Vermont’s freight railroads took a beating in this month’s floods. But rail officials say repairs are happening quickly, and the lines that are still damaged should be back on track soon.
“Our entire system was affected,” said Selden Houghton, president of Vermont Rail System. “Hopefully, by next week, we’ll be 100% put back together.”
Houghton spoke to a reporter by phone from Rutland, where he and other company leaders have been staying in hotels for the past two weeks, effectively setting up a base of operations for Vermont Rail System’s repair efforts in southern Vermont.
Likely the worst damage to the company’s network — one of the largest in the state — was to its Green Mountain Railroad, which carries several freight trains per week on an east-west route between Bellows Falls and Rutland.
As of Tuesday, 27 state-owned miles of that line, between Rutland and Ludlow, were still closed due to flood damage, according to Joe Flynn, secretary of the state Agency of Transportation.
A large washout during the storm along the Green Mountain Railroad, near Okemo Mountain Resort in Ludlow, left tracks suspended roughly 50 feet in the air — images of which were captured and replayed by national news organizations this month.
Meanwhile, another portion of the Green Mountain line, in East Wallingford, collapsed after a “big slope failure,” Houghton said, leaving tracks dangling over a cliff edge.
Flynn said Tuesday that he and other state officials continued to monitor the landscape around the Green Mountain line after two more landslides fell close to the tracks.
By Tuesday, workers had filled in almost all of the washed-out land underneath the Green Mountain line in Ludlow and planned to start laying tracks Wednesday, according to Houghton. In East Wallingford, meanwhile, crews were working to shore up the hillside, and track replacement was set to be completed early next week, he said.
Houghton said he expected that the Green Mountain Railroad would be fully up and running at some point next week, noting work had already been completed through the east side of Ludlow, where the line services a large talc mine.
Vermont Rail System also had “really significant” damage to its Washington County Railroad line, Houghton said, which carries at least one freight train a day and transports stone from quarries in the Barre area to an interchange in Montpelier.
Two locomotives and 11 freight cars were stranded in Barre during the flooding, and all will need to be repaired before they can be used again. Houghton said he expected that the entire Washington County line could be fully repaired by the end of next week.
According to Flynn, 11 state-owned miles of the capital region line remained closed Tuesday. He said crews, some 50 strong, were out along the line working on repairs as he spoke at a press conference Tuesday morning in Berlin.
Houghton estimated at least 25 businesses that the rail system’s freight lines serve were impacted, in some way, by the railroad damage, most often in the form of delays as trains had to be rerouted on other companies’ lines that were not damaged. Only two customers were completely shut off in the flooding, he said.
Vermont Rail System operates the tracks that one of the state’s major passenger rail routes — the Amtrak Ethan Allen Express — takes between Rutland and Burlington. Houghton said that portion of track, known as the Vermont Railway, had washouts and damage around the Otter Creek basin in Rutland County. Crews got the tracks fixed by the Friday after the storm, he said, but had to do additional work the following week after more rain fell during that weekend and damaged tracks south of Middlebury.
Both the Ethan Allen Express and the Vermonter — the state’s other Amtrak route, which runs on tracks owned by the New England Central Railroad — have resumed service after being suspended at the outset of the storm.
New England Central, which is also among the state’s largest railroads, suffered less extensive damage to its routes than did Vermont Rail System.
The railroad had the most damage in Montpelier, as well as between Bethel and Randolph, where some sections of track spanning up to 200 to 250 feet were submerged underwater, according to Tom Ciuba, a company spokesperson. He said all of that company’s track in Vermont was repaired within a week.
“It was a monumental effort by many to restore service in one week’s time,” Charles Hunter, a lobbyist for New England Central Railroad, said in a statement.
Back at Vermont Rail System, Houghton said the damage was comparable, in some areas, to what he witnessed after Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. But Irene — a geographically larger storm — also affected more railroad companies throughout New England, he said, which left his company more cut off and with fewer options to detour trains.
In this month’s storm, “Vermont wasn’t completely severed from the national rail network, like it pretty much was during Irene,” Houghton said.
Still, speaking Tuesday afternoon, the work was far from finished. After getting off the phone, Houghton was set to head back to the track repair site in East Wallingford.
“We’ve got a lot of folks that haven’t been home — or, you know, have been home minimally — in the last couple of weeks,” he said. “It’s very much a huge team effort.”
