As a follow up to yesterday’s post, I am presenting a sequence of photos at the same location that I made in March of 1986.

Amtrak had detoured its Montrealer via Palmer as a knock-on effect of a strike on the Boston & Maine. This was a full decade before Amtrak’s Vermonter used a similar routing.

In these photos, Train 61 the southward Montrealer was being towed by a CF7 from Palmer to Springfield, Massachusetts, having arrived in Palmer on the Central Vermont. There was no direct curve from the CV route to Conrail’s Boston Line to allow for a direct north to west move.

I had been showing some visiting photographers around Palmer, and we had set up a the rock cut at milepost 84, a short distance west of the Palmer diamond.

As the Montrealer was heading west on Track one, we could hear the chugging of six-motor GE C30-7As leading the eastward TV6. As it happened the two trains passed in front of us.

In yesterday’s post, I’d mentioned that a few months later, Conrail removed the westward track (Track 1) as part of its single tracking of the Boston Line. And that’s what makes this sequence so special.

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