The commuter rail is all fine & dandy if you want something slow and calm, but if you’re looking for a high-speed pass-by more than a couple seconds long, it will not deliver. So I set out to find a good place to record longer freight trains. Unfortunately, there are a couple problems with trying to record freight trains in the Boston area, and most of them stem from the amount of passenger train traffic in the area. Around here, CSX, Amtrak, and the MBTA all share the same rails and since happy commuters make for happy elected officials, the freight traffic gets shuffled around to accommodate the passengers, not the other way around. This means that the scheduling of freight traffic is inconsistent, and the closer you get to the city, rare. The main freight trunk into Boston roughly follows I-90 and on this line, CSX has a freight yard in Framingham that they use to break up the trains coming from points west to convert them into either smaller trains or (mostly) to load the freight onto trucks. In other words, if you want the chance of seeing more than one train a day, you have to drive out west of Framingham.

There’s actually a much larger, busier rail yard in Worcester and the line between Albany & Worcester is almost exclusively freight traffic, so if you really want to record freight trains in MA, western MA is where to do it. But there are few stations out there and as such, it takes considerably more scouting to find a place that you can set up legally & safely, while still being far enough away from civilization that other people don’t muck up your recordings. I found that the MBTA station at Grafton (just east of Worcester) was as good a place to try as any since it’s rural & secluded, but not so far away that I couldn’t drive there after work.

I really like these recordings; I think they came out well. The stereo imaging is nice and consistent – there’s a good spread without much of a hole in the middle: you can hear individual cars panning from one side to the other. Again, I took lousy notes, but I think I used a pair of Microtech Gefell M-295′s in an X-Y arrangement.