Mid January Update

Alot happening on the Michigan Interstate St.Clair Sub in the past week making preparations for and hosting the first session of 2016, 7th overall.

Saturday's session hosted 5 operators, lasted 4 hours, crewed 14 trains, and handled 125 car movements.

Our drive-in totals for trains included 4 manifests, 2 extended manifests, 2 local turns, 1 road turn, 1 CN haulage, 1 yard job, 1 coal train, 1 empty limestone train, and 1 HIWI special. So onward to the pictures and captions of the session. I made sure to post plenty of photos....

Bay Yard job Y-BA01-09 classifying a cut from the L-PBBA-09. This local left for Port Belle last session, went into staging, and returned to Bay City early in this session. The Chesepeake, Wheeling, and Erie hopper will return empty to Mountain State Carbon at Follansbee, WV. 

K-MYEX-07 bringing HIWI schnabel move across Saginaw River into Bay Yard. 

HIWI special seen again on Main 2 at Bay Yard. Once at Chessie Jct., train will head up Essexville Branch to Consumers Energy Karn Weadock power plant.

All quiet between trains in downtown Grays Lake, MI. For any of my normal readers, you will realize some structure placement changes here.

M-BAMC-09 departing westward from Bay Yard with EMD SD22ECO motors #2291 and 2290 on point.

Dean and Marshall coordinating moves for the Y-BA04-09 "Bay Local" while the M-BAMC-09 departs from track 2 in foreground.

Mike holding down the Dispatcher duties. During a lull in traffic Mike and Marshall swapped roles, letting everyone get a chance on the throttle or white board.

EMD GP38-2 #3828 at Grays Lake didn't make the local today, account mechanical issue. Luckily sister #3810 was on hand and took over duties for the R-GEGL-09.

M-MCBA-09 arriving at Bay Yard behind EMD SD40-2 #4052 and SD40-2M #4059. In the background you can see Y-BA04-09 switching the Michigan Agricultural Commodities terminal elevator.

Interesting steel load on M-MCBA-09 coming out of Essar Steel's Sault Ste. Marie plant.

CN overhead train Z-PHBK-09 idles on main 1 awaiting C-FWBA-08 in the foreground to clear off the main and into yard 1.

Bay Yard switcher (Y-BA01-09) and Bay local (Y-BA04-09) working the east end of Bay Yard.

Bay local pulling empty boxcar VMID1012 from Lakes Forest Products. This car will return to the Virginia Midland Railroad.

Work complete, empty pulled and load spotted.

While hybrid block cards are used instead of the traditional 4 cycle waybill cards, each of the locals does have a spot and pull sheet to help organize assigned work. The pulls page of the sheet is filled out prior to session. On the flip side is the spots page which is filled out when crew goes on duty.

Dispatching diagram for St. Clair Sub

Session wrapped up we see Bay Yard frozen in time with photos above and below.The amount of coal loads in the yard is directly related to the Sugar Beet plant coal train terminating at Bay Yard versus the plant. The Sugar Turn L-BAPB will take 5 of the 10 cars on the next northbound run. 

At Grays Lake we can see the outbound block of traffic for pick up on the next M-BAPH. Looking at the cars we see 2 empty plastic pellet hoppers, 3 loaded malted barley cars, and 3 loaded corn hoppers.

While 14 trains did operate the crew of the Bay Local did run "out of hours" after completing their customer switching on Bay Industrial Spur. The yardmaster will have to call a relief crew or use the evening yard crew to "dog catch" the local back to Bay Yard.

Wrapping up the session we see the Y-BA04-09 "Bay Local" tieing down with its engineer setting the hand brakes on NRE Genset 3GS21B #2101, while conductor dismounts to set brakes on the two boxcars adjacent to locomotive.

Thanks for stopping through, hope to have another update towards end of January showing project progress.

GM