PO&N North End Operations

Sub forum for Paper Railroads
User avatar
AARR
Ann Arbor RR Nerd
Posts: 37905
Joined: Wed Dec 22, 2004 7:39 pm
Location: Washington, MI

PO&N North End Operations

Unread post by AARR »

The north end of PO&N (Cass City - Caseville) has an interesting operation when they load a 65 car unit train. This happens on average every other month. It takes two shifts to complete switching and spot the loads for HESR to pick up. SBS/HESR/PO&N has 48 hours from time CSX releases cars in Flint to return the loads.

Keep in mind that HESR serves the huge elevator and bean plant (Cooperative Elevator) on the mile of track in Pigeon proper. We switch customers south of Pigeon (Linkville to Cass City) and north of Pigeon (Caseville).

HESR will deliver a 65 car unit and pair of GP38-2's and park them on the ex-GTW track with the engines pointing south.

We'll attach our ex-CN / nee GTW GP9R to the GP38-2's. We'll cut off the rear 11 covered hoppers in Pigeon and proceed south dropping blocks of 11 covered hoppers at Owendale (Vita Grain), Gagetown (Vita Grain), and Cass City (Merchant Grain), and 21 cars at the larger elevator south of Cass City (Star of the West). Owendale and Gagetown can load 3 cars per switch. Cass City all 11 cars. And Star of the West 11 cars. The cars that don't fit on the loading spur are staged at nearby passing sidings.

After spotting 11 cars at Star of the West we'll proceed north engine light. At Gagetown and Owendale we'll exchange 3 empties for 3 loads leaving the loads on the adjacent passing siding.

Arriving in Pigeon we'll use the short passing siding and go around the 11 covered hoppers, connect with them, and go north to Caseville. Caseville's elevator (Sibert Elevator) spur can load 3 cars at a time. So we leave the remaining 8 on the passing siding.

We run engine light to Cass City exchanging loads for empties at Owendale and Gagetown again. We leave the loads on the nearby passing sidings rather than take them with us. At Cass City we pick up the remaining 10 empties and run to Star of the West exchanging the 10 empties for 11 loads. We back the loads into Cass City onto one of the two passing sidings (one is where 11 other covered hoppers are loaded by Merchant).

Proceeding north we switch Gagetown and Owendale again heading to Caseville where we switch Sibert but this time we remain in Caseville quickly pulling and spotting loads for empties until all 11 cars are loaded.

We proceed south dropping the 11 loads from Caseville in Pigeon and run light engine switching the final blocks of loads for empties in Owendale and Gagetown leaving loads at nearby passing sidings.

We head to end of line to pull the final 10 loads from Star of the West, back those cars to Cass City, split the 10 onto the two passing sidings, run to the north end and assemble the 2 blocks into a 32 car block.

We proceed north, pulling the final loads from Gagetown and Owendale and adding them to our consist.

We arrive in Pigeon with 54 cars. We park them south of crossing, go past the 11 loads (parked north of the crossing) from Caseville via the passing siding, back onto the 11 and connect with the 54. Then with all 65 pull the train clear of crossing and park with engines on north end of train and detach our GP9R from HESR GP38-2's.

Total time elapsed is usually around 18-21 hours. The second crew is the PO&N southern branch (Dryden to North Branch).

A HESR crew will back the train onto the main and head for Saginaw.
PatC created a monster, 'cause nobody wants to see Don Simon no more they want AARR I'm chopped liver, well if you want AARR this is what I'll give ya, bad humor mixed with irrelevant info that'll make you roll your eyes quicker than a ~Z~ banhammer...

Post Reply