HD: A Trip Through The Notch

Date: June 22nd, 2013; 1220-1600 (12:20pm-4:00pm) Taken with an iPhone 4S

So, for my dad's 60th birthday, my friend Wendell and I came up with the idea of getting him a cab ride through Crawford Notch in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, over the former Maine Central Mountain Division. This is the bit of video I was able to record due to an almost dead battery. Our ride today was 252, a former Maine Central GP38 that had plied these rails for most of it's career.

The first clip starts at Frankenstein Trestle, named for a painter who specialized in paintings of the White Mountains, and particularly of the trestle. Then there's more footage of the climb up the side of the mountains, culminating in passing through The Gateway, a large cut in the rock face, to pass through the naturally formed notch that is Crawford Notch. There are a couple clips on the trip back of passing a Valley Train in Bartlett, pulled by former Finger Lakes Railway GP9, #1751. Earlier in the film, you can hear some radio chatter about when 1751 died on it's trip between North Conway and Conway. Then finally arriving back in North Conway at the end of the trip. It had started to downpour on our return trip, and the rain storms chased us the entire way back down the mountain.

Our engineer for the day, Rudy, was a great host with some great stories of his time as an engineer on the Boston and Maine and finally on Guilford. He was also a great laugh! Needless to say, my dad (and I!) were beyond thrilled with the ride.

One other thing. You'll notice a distinct rattle and heavy vibration when the locomotive was in Notch 2 that settles down in higher RPMs. I'm still not sure why it was like that, but locomotives can be finicky critters. I'm not claiming this to be the greatest footage, but here it is anyway!