Back in 2004 the City of New Bedford, MA rebuilt the abandoned rail yard on the city's waterfront. At the time the harbor dredging project was starting up and needed a way to ship out contaminated soil to Michigan so naturally the adjacent railyard was the answer. For the next 15 years the traffic was on and off due to bridge and track replacements on the mainline leading to the yard as well as changes in the dredging project itself. Around November 2019 the last loads of contaminated soil departed New Bedford Yard leaving it empty and unused. The yard's run around was still used but the yard storage tracks laid silent. The following three years only saw occasional use of the yard tracks for MOW storage, ballast train loading, as well as a one off delivery of tie plates in gondolas for the South Coast Rail Project.
In addition to the EPA dredge facility, Maritime Terminal located just south of the yard, restored their rail siding in 2014. It too was serviced on and off due to a bridge replacement project in 2016 although they transloaded for a time to continue rail service at a nearby loading dock. Once the bridge project was done they received cars until sometime in 2019. Two years later in February 2021 a reefer of frozen fish from Washington showed up on their siding and they have been a rail customer ever since. In recent months a large number of cars started to show up but due to the customer's siding length, they couldn't all be stored there. Initially the excess cars were either stored on a passing siding about a mile away or on the yard's run around track. That changed last month when the yard tracks started to fill up with reefers, the first revenue freight cars to be stored in that yard in almost three years. Three different tracks started to fill up with cars, around 15 or so total at a time. With increased traffic Mass Coastal Railroad has stationed a locomotive as a switcher that operates only within the yard and customer's siding on days they don't shuttle cars to/from Taunton, MA. The engine swaps out empty cars for loads and the MC-4 crew from Taunton picks up the empties, as well as brings in more loads, on another day. This operation let's Mass Coastal serve other customers on other lines without having to run to New Bedford every day.
In this video we see the back story of the yard, some rare moves between 2019 and 2022, as well as the new operations within the yard to accommodate the increased traffic. We also see LTEX 3011 on MC-4 switching the Maritime Terminal's siding with only room for two cars at the loading dock.
It is important to note that in the time period between 2019 and now, the tracks were not abandoned or out of service, just simply unused because of no traffic.
7/2022
New Bedford, MA
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