Back on Feb 19th I headed out with the family for a nice drive to catch the NBSR eastbound of that day. My original intent was to just go to the hot box detector at Cork (MP59.4) and wait for it there. My radio picks up quite a distance now with a higher gain antenna on it. But as I sat all was quiet on the main line channel. I tried to get a heads up on the train too but with no luck I decided to head for McAdam seeing how I was this close. We made it into McAdam by about 3pm. I made a quick drive around just to see if I could see anything and all was quiet. So we decided to get some lunch/supper at Klinkers Lounge on the main road through McAdam. They have good food by the way. I sat in the van with my radio on as we waited for our food. At about 3:15pm I heard the RTC in Maine call the eastbound asking where they were. The train responded that they were about 15 miles from Vanceboro, ME. I thought at the time it would work out perfect. Boy was I wrong.
The eastbound finally arrived into McAdam at 3:55pm. But they had some switching to do and this is where I started to loose my daylight. It took the two crews, (the crew from Maine and the new crew heading to SJ) almost an hour to do the shunting they had to do. The train finally left for Saint John at 5pm. So we headed out of town for the chase. I wasn't quite sure where I should catch this train as I headed towards Harvey. I like shooting in Harvey but the train makes real good time between there and Cork where the dirt road starts. It can be hard to keep ahead of a train in this area.The road wasn't in to bad of shape but I didn't want to push my van through it any harder than I had to. So I just kept going till I got to the eastern end of the dirt road at Vespra. I set up my shot on the side of the road and with a short wait the eastbound rolled through. I shot the whole train there because I pretty much figured that would be my only shot I would get. And as you can see from the screen shot above it was getting pretty dark by this time, which was about 5:50pm. Good thing I did! Catching up with this train after it rolled by was an interesting time. It was snowing a little bit and I was far behind. I didn't beat the train to the next crossing east of Vespra close to Tracy so we had to wait for it to pass again. I almost beat it to the crossing at Blissville on Rte 101, but the crossing lights came on. I was gonna be the first vehicle waiting for the train to pass so I grabbed my camera and did a hand held shot through the windshield. I only used it in my video because I thought it looked kind of sharp with the headlights causing a silhouette of the train going by. Definitely not a great shot but I didn't want to go home empty handed for the amount of driving I did.
The eastbound train was one of the longer ones I've seen on the NBSR lately. It had engines 2317, 2319, slug 008, and 2318 for power and had 81 cars in tow. Here's the video I made from my chase..
Here is also my most recent CN video of train 406 from March 12th.
