In July, I was fortunate enough to stumble upon the then-daily, but still hard to find, Allegheny Valley Railroad crew working on upgrading the maximum speed of the B&O Pike. After dropping hall their train on the interchange at Bruceton, the crew emptied the first car in their consist ballasting the main.
This catch was a first for me...quite a few of the ballast train videos on YouTube feature either distant shots or the newer remotely controlled Herzog cars. Carload Express, which was borrowing former coal service cars from the Wheeling & Lake Erie, had no such luxury; instead, the crew unloaded the cars by walking on the slope of the roadbed, using chains, ratchets, and a mallet to open and close the bay doors manually. Seems somewhat hazardous, from my layman's perspective, but the RJ Corman crew seemed to take it in stride.
And, as is par for the course in almost all my recent AVR videos, the power of choice was a former Norfolk Southern GP59, which the crew had to briefly shove into run 8 when the cars gathered too much momentum.
Approximate timestamps:
(0:00) Intro
(0:13) Positioning the train for the dump (run 8 GP59)
(2:47) Preparing to open the hopper doors
(4:20) The first dump begins
(5:52) Moving and spreading with a crosstie
(7:18) Closing the first bay
(8:30) Opening the next bay
(10:40) The second run begins
(11:27) Photos
