Had the opportunity to spend some time in the presence of a real railroad relic today - a working relic, no less.
A several phone calls allowed me to connect with the old beast as it was clearing away brush along a long-unused right-of-way:
And what a marvelous machine it is:
I was there when the crew took a break for lunch.
The old CN piece is still powered by air - every now and then the crew would have to pause in moving the various pieces around while the locomotive recharged the spreader’s reservoir.
You can get an idea of the potential span of a Jordan Spreader from this shot:
After lunch, the crew mounted up and proceeded on with their tasks:
This particular railroad is frugal - after all why paint something with a perfectly good coat of paint on it? This particular locomotive is also a movie star. If you’ve seen the movie “Atomic Train”, you saw this locomotive.
Before and after shots so you can see that the old girl was doing a very effective job:
Progress was slow, to say the least. Aside from a general restriction of no more than 5 mph, immovable objects like rock walls and culverts, as well as things like grade crossing signage and the crossings themselves resulted in stops while the crew readjusted the wings.
I’m not sure how much they got done, but they were definitely looking at returning to finish the task.
I’d probably have a few more pictures, but I w