us sugar charter

at the end of january i flew to palm beach florida, to attend a trains magazine charter on the us sugar corporation owned railroad, featuring their restored # 148, a 4-6-2 restored to steam in 2020. manufactured in 1920 by alco for the fec line in florida it hauled many passenger and freight trains over the flat florida lands. saturday and sunday were the charter days, and it was not warm that weekend in florida, 34 at 7 am saturday at train start, and 36 at 7 am sunday. but i did miss the blizzard conditions in ny on saturday.
first up saturday, a runby out on the southeast sugar cane lines, us sugar has a pretty good size diesel fleet and hundreds of old boxcars cut apart and fashioned into sugar cars. the cane has to arrive at the mill within 8-12 hours of cutting or it starts to starch up and becomes useless.

 

at a diamond crossing, the lines are like a giant spider web of a couple of mainlines and branches going off to loaders. this diamond is where the main cane track crosses their mainline, they do some bridge transfer freight moves from sebring to the northwest from csx down to the southeast to florida east coast

 

crossing one of the many canals, us sugar is based in clewiston florida, about 63 miles west of west palm beach, on lake okechobee, these canals all have alligators in them, but it was so cold we did not see many until mid afternoon when they finally started out of the water onto the banks. saturday was a mixed train, some cane cars and our passenger cars at the end of the train. us sugar is restoring some more cars and has gone into the tourist train business.




the large smoke cloud ahead of the engine is from burning off the cane stubble, an old school method going out of favor now due to air quality concerns, also as many of the land leases expire, us sugar is not renewing and the land will revert to natural growth, restoring the lake okechobee recharge basin.

 

that is a sugar mill in the background, although a competitor, not us sugar

 

coming around a bend, flat florida proved more amenable to good shots than i expected, i would do this again, especially since there were some issues due to this being the first time for us sugar, i would expect them to be resolved by the return

 

cane cars, you can see the boxcar lineage, and quite a few interesting things, some of the federal railroad administration stuff is not needed, these are captive cars that never leave the us sugar line. after they are pulled to the mill they are put on a semi rotary dumper that tilts them just enough to open those side doors and the cane to slide out
more posts from sunday to follow

 

this was open to public ticket sales, trains magazine arranged and organized all the details, tickets were sold through eventbrite, i believe i bought mine back in june, i subscribe to trains magazine so that is how i learned about it, if they run another, which they talked like they plan to, i'll let you know as soon as i hear. lunch was provided both days, a caterer came on board and set up in the forward car, it was excellent food, barbecue and an outstanding cole slaw on saturday, good praise indeed from someone who is not a major coleslaw fan. this area has few public roads so the only real way to get most of the shots is to be on the charter

 

starting posts from sunday 1/30/22, i'll be at this off and on today, i have a couple of things to do mid morning. we started out getting dragged backwards by the engine up a ways to where there is a siding that the engine could disconnect as shown here and run around the train so it was facing south the rest of the day. we couldn't go all the way to lake placid, this is somewhere around palmdale, the water tanker , made from a second tender wasn't ready on time for us to venture all the way as planned, one of the things us sugar has vowed to fix for the next charter.

 

today we were all passenger, our conductor got into the part, today he had on passenger conductor uniform, as would be proper. doing a runby after hooking back onto the train

 

on the bridge over fish eating creek, we were able to go down onto the sandy strip along the water, but were cautioned against going within 2 feet of the edge due to alligator risk, although none were spotted here

 

we are at the crossing for the state park/campground on the creek, it was a very tough angle to get the full car

 

this is a runby at a loader, the cars are positioned with the first car under the conveyor, if you look along the cement walkway on the right, you see a cable, this is a winch system hooked to the front car that pulls them along as each is loaded, when the train is done the cable is unhooked and engines come out from the mill, drop off empties and hook up to the full ones and take them back to the mill, tractors tow carts with cut cane up the concrete ramp and dump cut cane into the conveyor system. we saw cane being cut and tractors and tractor trailers pulling cane all day long on saturday, but a lot of the harvesting we saw from a moving train so i have no photos of the process.

 

the train dropped us off and we had a bit of a hike up onto this road bridge, route 27, over the caloosahatchee canal, a waterway going from lake okechobee out to fort meyers and the gulf. we had plenty of time as the train had to pause off the left side off the bridge at a fire hydrant to get water. steam trains use a lot of water doing runways. much more usage than straight steaming travel. that is a lock up at the top right, one at each end of the connector to the lake, you can cross florida from the intercostal waterway to the gulf via this canal, lake and eastern connector

CORRECTION EDIT, THE WEST END OF THE CANAL , GULF EXIT IS FORT MEYERS

 

a little wider view of our train on the bridge

 

and last runby of the day, the dispatcher wanted his line back, he had cane to move, they gave us this line unopposed for 8 hours



and 148 burns recycled motor oil, so unlike the grand canyon engines you do not get the odor of french fries as it goes past, what i did get was a very unpleasant fine mist of unburned oil particles, causing me to spend the next 20 minutes with wet wipes cleaning the outside of both my A1 and the attached lens, the uv filter i just threw away and purchased another . never sitting that close to a track speed runby again, at least not an oil burner

 

the very friendly crew from sunday, us sugar really wanted to make this a positive experience since they are looking to create a market and nothing works better than satisfied clients

 

Unfortunately that isn’t likely. I think they want to avoid cane season next time to avoid any dispatch issues. I’m guessing the next one would be in the September timeframe.

 

indeed, saturday had less runbys than originally planned, due to some holds for cane trains being given the right of way, this is a tourist train being operated inside a closed commercial rail operation, during cane season. and i also think that the charter organizers had a very ambitious schedule planned, and those take a lot of good timing and good loading and unloading skills from the participants, although this was mostly a very experienced charter crowd, i saw and spoke with many attendees that i see regularly on lerro charters. being ambitious about the locations can be good though, the organizers are trying to give a good show.