"Up North" Gawking (District 1 sightings)

Would love to know what csx found that they hadn’t discovered in the pre purchase inspection! Things were pretty run down already

I'm sure they knew and it's simply a case of "when the rubber meets the road". Pretty sure Boychuck presented the Hillbilly branch as an example to the STB.

Looks like CHUX has CSXT locos back on M426 between Lewiston and Greene today. I saw M426 in Lewiston back in April with CSXT power but was generally the PAR Yugos over the last two months as most have noted.

I am told 426/427 will again be extended to Keag when trackwork is complete.

Based on recent videos, there’s still a fair amount of uninstalled cwr and 10mph north of portland
Is the extension a next summer plan?

I believe new CWR has been dropped from Waterville to near the border of Greene/Lewiston, maybe just past it. I wonder when it will be installed.

F74265A wrote: ↑Mon Jul 31, 2023 7:40 am Based on recent videos, there’s still a fair amount of uninstalled cwr and 10mph north of portland
Is the extension a next summer plan?

Not sure, whenever it's done. There's plenty of 10 south of Waterville too.

Interesting observation in Rumford yesterday was the sight of multiple Hub Group 53 foot domestic
containers on NS highway chassis at ND Paper's 15PM loading dock.

Photo of 426 with Eng 7605-7541-510-515 and 45 cars at Merrill Rd in Lewiston this AM. Tied down
in the siding at Cressy ( east end of Leeds Jct ) was CSX 9969 with an OCS extra.

At Strawberry Ave. in Lewiston MEC 504 was tied down in the siding with a westbound
empty rail train.

Drove around Readfield and Belgrade today. Saw CWR laying along the line at all crossings I saw — Rt. 17, Luce, Plains, and Bartlett — but interestingly a bobcat parked at Luce.

ND Paper in Rumford is going down for a maintenance outage on Saturday and hopes to
start up production in mid- September. 15 Paper Machine is getting a new press section
installed, new tubes for the recovery boiler and many other smaller projects- there is at
least 15 contractors involved and I'm told it is the first major outage in 10 years.

Has CSX gotten ops on D1 under control yet, or is it still mostly just running "whatever whenever wherever"? IF there is any predicatability yet, any info on RUPO/PORU (and/or whatever they call the various portions of it), WAPO/POWA, WANM/NMWA, PO-3 (Brunswick), etc. would be helpful to try to plan some shooting this fall. Is SAPPI still at least a reliable daily run into Waterville in lare AM and back up in early-mid afternoon? (I realize CSX has started calling jobs by new names but I'm still figuring out what- so for clarity I'm using the old PAR nomencalture rather than random-gobbledygook CSX symbols). Thanks !

In addition to the ever increasing amounts of rail and track material staged along the right of way today
I noticed a line of track maintenance machinery on the back track at Rumford Junction belonging to
R. J. Corman along with a red 5-axel box truck at Danville also belonging to Corman. Another recent
addition is the installation of a fairly tall antenna adjacent to the Allied Road crossing east of the
International Paper container plant.

Could be the equipment from Keag. The local up there posted a video of the old stick rail being picked up. Installation is complete it looks like so they probably are working down here down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zP9RtRVoTM