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From: Todd Hollritt thollritt AT yahoo DOT com
Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:32:03 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Re: Great Notch images
"3626_eastbound_at_Great_Notch_station.jpg" - image/jpeg, 1764x1618 (24bit)

Here is a typical Winter afternoon at Great Notch in 1975, I recall this was a snow day as school was closed, a perfect chance to see some EL trains after the storm, I actually rode my bike through the fresh fallen snow to get to the station, it was not an east ride! After finally making it to the warmth of the pot belly stove in the waiting room, the first train to arrive was the Silver Lake Drill with engine 450, it rolled west around noon. You can actually see a whisp of snow off those covered hoppers, this was the first chance the drill got up to speed after the climb west though Bloomfield and Montclair. The 450 was just starting its decent toward Little Falls. Then an eastbound freight soon arrived from Scranton with SD-45 3626, 3608 and SD45-2 3674, they sounded great working their way up the hill from Cedar Grove to the station at a crawl in notch 8, as was the practice they stopped sanding at the crossovers and throttled down to keep from
slipping then right back up. But you could hear something was wrong, SD45-2 3674 had shut down, unable to handle the strain of the uphill battle any longer. You can see that the fireman had run back and was now trying to restart the unit before they stalled, thus blocking the interlocking and all the road crossings east of Great Notch. Their was no following train to offer them a push! The remaining two SD-45 locomotives were at at an ear piercing roar as the passed the station at nothing more than a walking pace! At one point the fireman must have has success in getting the 3674 running again, the engineer must have breathed a sigh of relief as the long train, and soon the caboose slowly rolled past the station, another EL freight had tackled the mountain. I would hear this struggle take place every day from my classroom as the trains worked their way through town, now I experinced it all firsthand. Later that afternoon train 1041 would
go west, and in the photo you see 1040 at about 4:45 heading back to Hoboken, it was getting dark and time to grab my bike and make my way home, not a bad snow day!

Todd ~

3626_eastbound_at_Great_Notch_station.jpg

Image EXIF Data:
Image Creation Date   2011:12:17 09:43:07
Image Unique ID   27DDF55C1154496182C724A96016D7E0


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