Coal trains in Cape Breton - Sydney Coal Railway operations at Lingan in Feb. 2023 скачать в хорошем качестве

Coal trains in Cape Breton - Sydney Coal Railway operations at Lingan in Feb. 2023

Coal trains once formed a major part of Cape Breton's railway landscape, but with most of Cape Breton's railways gone and the coal mines all closed, there's only one tiny remnant of that still running today - the Sydney Coal Railway (SCR). The SCR operates a roughly 14-mile line between the international coal pier in Sydney and the coal-fired generating station at Lingan, running loads of imported coal to the power plant. The line is owned by Emera/Nova Scotia Power, and the railway is currently operated by Savage. The equipment roster consists of 5 GMDD built GP38-2s, originally operated by Devco, and a fleet of 5-bay hoppers also built for Devco back when the company operated mines and the railway in Cape Breton. Here we see a snippet of SCR operations on February 21, 2023. At this time, the SCR was making three deliveries to the plant daily (running 21-car unit trains), using two crews to operate. When I first came across them around 1:15pm, units 222 and 218 (operating as SCR Work 222) were waiting at the power plant gate while their train finished unloading. A car mover in the unloading shed moves the cars through to unload, so the power isn't required. Once the cars finished unloading, the power would run back to pick up the empty cars and wait on the arrival of SCR Work 217 (running with units 217 and 228), and the two trains would meet right on the loop at the plant. Since this was the last delivery of loads for the day, once the second train had dropped their train they would run back to the yard at Victoria Junction light engines, following just behind SCR 222. The cars would be unloaded afterwards, and the empty train would be picked up the next morning by the first crew of the day. After leaving Lingan, I got ahead of the train at River Ryan (on Lingan Rd.) to catch both SCR 222 and the light power move following them. That was it for operations that day, so I'd have to wait until the following day to see what else I could catch.