The Wood Job

We had heard that a few new converted woodchip hoppers had been freshly placed into revenue service by the Bangor and Arrostook and were anxious to get photos.

We were pretty excited to catch the MEC Wood Job returning empties from the pulp mill at Old Town to the interchange point at NMJ.

MEC GP7 565 is on the point as motive power today and we caught it as it pulled up and set the brakes at Parker's Creek signal awaiting clearance from the dispatcher. Luck is with us today as it provides a ample opportunity to run back down the road we drove in on to the pasture adjacent to the creek where we can get a better look at the rest of the train and take a few photos of the new chip hoppers.

We have a nice cut of cars to look at today and can just barely see the caboose thru the trees at the end of the train

This style car was used by the BAR from the 1960's. According to the 1984 Official Railway Equipment Register, BAR had 479 wood chip cars in service at that time, and they were numbered between 3370 and 3849.

Per Larry Goss's website, the origins of the woodchip cars are as follows:
3370-3567 1965-69 from 9000series PS1
3568-3574 1967 from 4000 ACF
3575-3694 1977 from 4000 ACF
3700-3849 1972 from 2000 Magors

We decided I should climb a tree and try and get an overhead shot and here's how it turned out.

We had run out of time and had to get home for lunch so we went up on the hill on the opposite side of the road to get another shot of the head end.

Didn't realize til we got home that over in the trees, on the edge of the pasture there was the engineer, Doug Funnie and his girlfriend Patti Mayo making out in the bushes !!

Progress Report on the BAR Woodchip Hopper Conversion Project

A quick post to show off some of the works in progress. Took a couple of snapshots of some of the woodchip hoppers I am working on this evening. Decided I would share a few of them.

The lead car in the number series is road number 3383 so numbered for my oldest daughter as this is the day of her entry into the world.















Road number 3841 is modeled after a car I happened to find a photo of.
http://users.silcon.com/~lgoss/bar3841.htm

I found a few other of photos of other chip hoppers out in cyberspace that I will more closely detail and model to the prototype.









I started these cars while on deployment in Iraq last fall. I am home now in Rincon and am in the process of finishing up the decals and the detail bits so that I may place them into revenue service. I have 8 cars painted and 7 cars decaled.

There are another 19 Front Range and Branchline 40' boxcars awaiting conversion into woodchip hoppers, 10 of which are well along in the conversion and 9 that are still in the boxes







All for now,
Mike

Been awhile since I have posted and with good reason ! I have been busy working on BAR Woodchip hoppers and re-deploying from Iraq !! But - as luck would have it I got invited to an operating session on Saturday Sept 23rd on the Clinchfield Northern, a single track layout built by my good friend Nate Stone.
There were 11 of us there to operate the Clinchfield Northern !
Needless to say, we had a great time. Nate's Clinchfield Northern represents the Clinchfield RR from Spartanburg SC to Elkhorn City and he has done an awesome job recreating several well known locations on the Clinchfield. Like Bostic Yard, The gorge, Toe River, Rocky, Caney, and others
The photo to the left is looking up the gorge at Rocky where a passing siding is located. As you can see on the skyline 'Bald Mountain' looms in the distance. Nate set up the operating session for near present day so we ran all 2nd and 3rd generation CSX power on the road. The session lasted nearly 5 hours with an hour break for lunch....
I will post a couple of videos as soon as I figure out how to do it on the blogger.

All for now,
Mike