Arriving in Concord, I set on on the Second Street crossing and waited for Paul and Peter to meet me. They were working about a mile south of the crossing tamping ballast and new ties that had been installed in the weeks prior and Peter and I were to head north along the line to set down new tie plates.

Peter, the owner of NEGS, rode with me in my car as we patrolled from N49 all the way to the end of the line in Penacook, placing tie plates on all the newly installed ties, and picking up the old spikes, placing them in spike buckets. Since I did not have a lolly car to pull behind my trackcar we placed the buckets on the front handles, and then we they got full, loaded them into the cab. Once we filled all the buckets that we had, we had to go back to Second St. and empty our buckets into the larger ones track side. Because we had to do this we ended up putting a lot more physical effort into what was already a physical workout. Although Peter had been doing this all weekend, by the time I got home I was pretty sore, and realized that I really needed to get back to the gym!

Heading north on the Northern

 Heading back to Concord in the dark was a first trip for me in my speeder in the night, and it was pretty interesting. I found that I needed to replace my lights with 100W H3 kits, as the 55W lights really did not put out as much as I wanted. I think that the 100W kits will produce a very nice beam so that you can see clearly down the track. Dropping off Peter at a crossing to pick up his truck so I could meet him at Second St, he flagged me across the grade while I gave some sharp blasts on my new air horn. The deep commanding sound of the locomotive horn sounded great in the cold crisp air.

Entering Penacook