I was in Prairie du Chien monday and noticed W&S power tied up near the river. what are their opertions out in that area? There seemed to be a sand mining operation there along with interchange withBNSF.
What else do they handle out there?
ed
Although I don't know the exact operations of the WSOR's west end, the last that I heard is that they were going out to PDC twice a week. If you saw the power there on Monday, then they must have went west on Sunday. The crew will head out of Madison, work the line all the way to PDC then tie up there. After staying their rest at a local motel, they will head back to Madison the next day. Usually this had been going west out of Madison in the late afternoon/early evening, so they wouldn't have tied up at PDC until early on the next morning. That would mean they would have been on their rest until early afternoon on Monday (or which ever next day). They would have went on duty that afternoon and worked the line back eastward to Madison.
I don't know what exactly they work on the route, but they are the only thing out there to serve the customers west of Middleton. I think that there are times when one of the Madison-based locals will run out to Mazomanie to work, but for the most part, this job is it.
Lance
i was in town Sunday evening and the power wasnt there but arrived overnight (3 units). There were quite a few cars at the xing with BNSF, obviously interchange.
I remember reading I believe in Trains Mag at one time they picked up coal on the west end to take back to Madison.
Traffic has picked up quite a bit on the WSOR's line to PDC, especially with the sand traffic you noticed. What Lance said is still pretty much the usual operating pattern from what I've been told, except they now run three turns a week. The Madison to PDC run is usually Sunday Tuesday and Thursday, and the return is on the crew's rest on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. There have been some exceptions to this, but it seems to be the general pattern.
There is at least one, if not two transload operations for sand going on in the PDC area on the WSOR. One of them I believe involves the cars simply being loaded on the WSOR on St. Ferrole Island (the area where the power would have tied up) and then moved to the BNSF interchange. Other cars move via the WSOR and Madison on their way to their final destination.
There is also a lot of grain that shipped this fall, and when combined with the sand traffic and some of the other traffic on the line, trains of around 100 cars and running with three SD40s aren't uncommon. They've been steadily upgrading the line for faster speed. Becacuse of the increased traffic there was talk from the WSOR's president of trying to run the PDC train directly to and from Janesville to decrease dwell times for cars.
herdebu, the coal traffic was being transloaded from barges off the Mississippi River and headed to the UW-Madison heating plant. Coal hasn't come from PDC in a number of years though, and this year the plant switched from buring coal to natural gas.
Noah
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