There has been rampent speculation for about two years that CSX will be closing off freight traffic East of Worcester, MA in the near future. The reasons are many but mostly due to the extreamly sucessful expansion of the MBTA, easilly the best regional commuter railroad for a city of its size.
Its been over a decade since Conrail operated the rails. While the car loadings have changed somewhat, no cryo cars anymore but tons of trash flats and scrap cars, the overall picture has remained fairly stable.
Starting with my first camera purchase in 2003 I have been documenting the freight cars on the line. I started mostly shooting the cars I remembered from the 1990's. Over the past two years I have been trying to shoot the overall picture of treight trains in the area. This includes newer cars as well as the onler ones I used to focus on. Right now I have about 8-10,000 photos of rolling stock and infastructure in and around Framingham and Worcester.
I hope this information will someday help me reconstruct the prototypical freight car operations and movements. This information is too valuble to loose and time is running out.
