Any Railfans On Chess.com?

If there are any, please join my club and subscribe to my yt channel Northeast_Railfan.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJWY5Zwb4eFrEf3R4qxaKaA

I'm sort of a rail fan. I worked for a company that converted Metro-North's FL9s into diesel-electrics back around 1993. Various companies bought and sold that plant over the years while the employees just stayed and kept working. We mostly built light-rail but sometimes got a commuter contract. The last project before my retirement was the new AMTRAK cars.

I was just an IT geek but my mantra was "I Build Trains". No matter how involved I became in my electronics world I never allowed myself to forget the company's focus. Keeping product going out the door paid my salary so production was often more important than the new "toy" I wanted to spend too much time playing with.

I'm not a joiner as a rule but I'm sure I'll enjoy your YT channel.

That's cool! I'm a big fan of Metro North. Now it's the P32's that have taken over for the diesel, M8s for the electric power, and M3s and M7s for third rail with M9s coming.

Thank you!

https://www.chess.com/club/chess-com-railfan-club

That is my club for railfans. Even if you don't railfan, you can still join since you were involved with trains. That was probably a cool job.

It took a couple tries to find these. I thought you'd like them.
This is "Big Chug", the switcher used to move cars around the plant. The company had already sold its smaller cousin, "Little Toot". Sorry about the focus.

At one point, for various reasons, we accumulated a stockpile of the AMTRAK Baggage cars we were making. Here are some pics of AMTRAK hauling them away.
The Locomotive

Coming out of the plant. We bought an abandoned spur line from Norfolk Southern to get access to the outside world's rails. All our previous projects' cars were small enough, relatively speaking, to ship on large flatbed type trailers. These cars were too big.

Every green light is a Baggage car.

We irritated more than a few motorists by closing a busy cross street for some time. The last car is an older model AMTRAK. A Diner, I think, for the crew to use. I believe our cars went to Syracuse and then off to some AMTRAK destination.

Thank you! Yeah, the last one, that is a cafe car. The Amtrak power was all heritage. AMTK 42 Veterans unit and the second locomotive was most likely AMTK 145 40th anniversary phase III heritage. BTW, when was the baggage move out?

If the date stamp is correct this was on December 17th, 2014.

Thanks!

All bets are off but I seem to remember it being seventeen cars, the most we ever delivered at once. I left a few years later as the project was winding down. Watching production was something. The car shells were in a dual rows of three I think, without bogies. They were on stands about eight feet tall. Mezzanines ran down one side of the cars at floor level. This way people could work underneath, inside, and on top (with safety harness and cable) at the same time. big and impressive.
Even more impressive to me were the machines I bought the CAD/CAM guys designing the cars. I almost shorted one out one day I was drooling so bad. They could 3D render an entire rail car. Every nut, bolt, pipe, wire, you name it. Then they could rotate or spin it, enlarging, shrinking. Man, I wanted one of those!

That's cool

Did you hear about the new Metro North Laser Train wrap? It's really cool.