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Necedah Loop 2010 .

Necedah Loop 2010

I filmed and wrote this page in 2010, and had it on the NexGen website until that disappeared in 2014.
Then I updated it just enough to get it onto my active TrainWeb pages.

Necedah is a nice small town in Wisconsin.
I have driven through there about 50 times in the 1970's.
Didn't see many trains, but back then I usually went through in the daytime in the 1970's and the Milwaukee Road trains usually ran at night. And I remember the yellow passenger train that ran from New Lisbon to Wausau. One F unit and one car. That ended when Amtrak started.

And before the (1980's?) there wasn't an interchange between the Milwaukee Road and Chicago and Northwestern.

Looking north at the former CNW , now UP, over the former Milw Road Valley Line, now CN / WC.

In 2011, The UP got back the coal contract for Weston Power in Wausau.
The interchange loop sees some long trains on this over-and-under trackwork.
You can see the locomotives on one track and some coal cars on the other,
see below for a link to a picture by Dennis Weber.

It could make a nice model railroad plan.
My map is not to any scale or dimension. And it is a gif file, some browsers don't show that type of file.

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Here is a photo journey around the interchange loop.

Looking southwest down the Milw / CN at the switch called South Necedah.
The interchange loop goes right / west toward the industrial park.
(. . . . . . . pardon my white kite string . . . . .)
There is recent work and ballasting at the switch, for installing a remote-controlled switch and signals. (in 2010)

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The loop turns North. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . near the horizon is the CNW main.

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With this many trees and this big of a loop, I couldn't get a whole train here from a kite camera.
http://msrmaps.com/ shows the mapping aerial picture from 1998, with a train waiting.
You can find it and zoom in twice as large as this.

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Looking far west, the CNW / UP main comes in from Wyeville

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The loop joins the CNW / UP siding

Here's info from some flickr picture messages:
Dean- there will be one power switch for the main/siding (hence the Control Point), but the siding/loop switch looks like it will stay hand-throw (the siding isn't used for much of anything anyhow).
Down on the CN, they have installed a radio-controlled power switch with indicator signal.
Getting down through the loop should be a pretty painless endeavor once all this hardware is in place.

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The siding joins the main near the Hiway 80 bridge.
They're preparing something by the switch.
(the pictures on this page were taken in 2010. This is the location of another new power switch.
Note the telegraph poles / signal wires. Not many places in Wisconsin have them anymore.

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Looking northwest at the east switch area, hidden by trees. There's fresh piles of sand (in 2010),
and note that there were a lot of white construction trucks on the short street to the left.

In the distance is a lone hill, called a monadnock, a bump on the flat landscape.

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Hiway 80 girder bridge.

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Interesting steps connecting track level to street level. Why?
I don't know where the old depots were.

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The CNW stays level as it crosses Hiway 80 and the Milw tracks.

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and on over the Yellow River.
Note, the truss bridge was built wide to carry a double-track mainline, although it only has one track.

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Looking east ward

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An eastbound did come through about 11am.

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The second unit of the 4 was the blue Olympic Torch unit,
but I knew my camera wouldn't re-set fast enough to catch the first unit and then the second unit at 40 mph.

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I wonder if a double-stack would fit underneath? Looks low.
The UP coal trains still go around the loop in 2021.
A freight train from Adams, Wisconsin, to Superior also goes through, using trackage rights on CN from Wisconsin Rapids to Superior.
And occasionally, a tank train.
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Here's some old links to other pictures of this area. You might have to use BACK to return to my page.

For more pictures later in November 2010, see Flickr pictures of Necedah by Matthew H.

And here's some 2011 over-and-under train pictures by Dennis Weber.
The thumbnail index for his 5 pictures is on UP Unit Coal at Necedah

. . . and one picture of the set is. . . . . . . . . . . . Unit Coal train in Neceda, showing the train on two levels where it crosses Hiway 80 at grade and on the silver bridge over the highway.

I would guess a 140-car train would be long enough to get an over-and-under view at the RR bridge crossover.
Just think what you could do with some Photoshopping. You could position the train anywhere you want!
Like putting the rear end power over the head end at the crossover.
First, it would take some pictures in good sunlight. And I think there's a train per day, but I don't know if it has a schedule and if it runs in daylight everytime.
The train from Whit to Weston power has run at any hour of the day and night.

My 2011 page about . . . . . . . . Whit , the new siding some 30 miles north of here where UP trains are handed off to the CN / WC.

And i also had a webpage about the hills called monodnocks in this area, but it went away when the NexGen site quit.
I do have this one picture on the web yet, the Roch a Cri monadnoch

Link back to my index page, Bruce's RailRoad Pictures

( the index page is now on the Next Generation free web site, as of July 2010 )
wrote and filmed Nov, 2010, updated 2021.