**UPDATE: Traffic returned to this location on July 17 with an 80-car manifest train.**
Last week, the remnants of Tropical Storm Beryl battered central and northern Vermont with heavy rain from Wednesday July 10 through Thursday July 11. Areas received up to 7 inches of rain in less than a day and saw flooding that caused railroad track washouts.
Some of the worst hit areas were in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. RailState has a network sensor in that part of Vermont, in Island Pond, that covers train movements across the Vermont-Canada border on the St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad.
On average, this location sees about one manifest train per weekday and a total car count of 50-80 cars per day. These trains carry a mix of centerbeam flatcars, box cars, and a large number of tank cars displaying HAZMAT placards with UN numbers for a variety of materials, most commonly, liquefied petroleum gas, sodium hypochlorite, and sulfuric acid.
The location rarely sees train volume on weekends.
Below is the daily car volume in June at Island Pond, VT:
The last freight train passed on July 10 before the worst of the rainfall. Since then, the area has seen only a Maintenance of Way train on July 12. This train carried long strings of rail for track repairs to a washed out section.
The rail pieces, used in Continuous Welded Rail, ran most of the length of the train, which RailState’s sensor estimated to be about 1900 feet long.
The image shows the beginning of the rail pieces toward the front of the train, as captured by the RailState sensor.
Crews expect to have these rail sections repaired and up and running within a week. As always, RailState’s sensors will be capturing the latest train movements in real-time.
To learn more about how you can stay up-to-date on issues across the rail network and use real-time rail network data to enhance your supply chain, reach out to contact@railstate.com or request a demo.
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