David Wulfson is sleeping in his truck again.
Back in 2011, the CEO and co-owner of Vermont Rail System lived out of his pickup for weeks while repair crews worked around the clock to get the company’s 400-mile railroad network up and running again after Tropical Storm Irene.
The damage to Vermont’s train tracks and bridges from last week’s historic storm, which dumped as much as nine inches of rain on some parts of the state, wasn’t as severe or widespread. Both of Amtrak’s passenger trains in Vermont — the Vermonter, which runs daily trips between St. Albans and Washington, D.C.; and the Ethan Allen Express, which shuttles daily between Burlington and New York City — were suspended for five days but resumed operations last Friday night.
But passenger service represents only a small fraction of rail traffic in Vermont compared to freight. The New England Central Railroad suffered modest damage to its line, particularly in the Berlin area and between Bethel and Randolph. According to a New England Central spokesperson, each included about 200 to 250 feet of tracks that were damaged, washed out or underwater.
Far more serious were the blows to VRS’s Green Mountain Railroad, which runs between Rutland and Bellows Falls, and to its Washington County Railroad, a portion of which operates between Montpelier and Barre.
The Green Mountain Railroad suffered “pretty major damage,” Wulfson said. “I’m hoping we can get this open in two or three weeks.”
Seven Days reached Wulfson by phone in Ludlow at the site of a major washout near the Okemo Mountain access road — “The one everyone’s got all over the internet,” he said. Photos of those tracks, suspended like clotheslines 50 feet in the air, made national news.
Equally serious is the devastation to Green Mountain Railroad’s tracks in East Wallingford. That includes a large slope failure along the Mill River that Vermont Transportation Secretary Joe Flynn described as “getting worse.”
According to Wulfson, the hillside will have to be rebuilt from the bottom up, with rock that is trucked in rather than delivered by rail, since the tracks to the east and west are still impassable. “We’ve been able to reroute a lot of our traffic. It’s short term and it’s expensive, but at least our customers have service,” Wulfson added. “The traffic might be delayed a day or two or three. But it’s not like it was in Irene, when the whole Northeast was screwed and we couldn’t move anything anywhere.”
Repairing the Washington County Railroad line between Montpelier and Barre is likely to take longer than other problem spots. “That thing is toast. There’s some huge damage up there,” Wulfson said. VRS and the state are still assessing the extent of it, so neither he nor Flynn could estimate when it will be up and running again.
Two VRS locomotives in Barre were submerged in five feet of floodwater, up to their motors. It’s unknown whether they’re a total loss. Said Wulfson, “I don’t even know if we’ve looked at them yet.”
That’s bad news for Eric Morton, general manager of North East Materials in Graniteville. His company relies on the railroad to haul rocks that weigh as much as 40 tons apiece to marine projects up and down the eastern seaboard. Without the trains, he said, nothing can move.
“The stuff going out by railroad is primarily for marine construction work for the Army Corps of Engineers,” Morton said, “so those projects are on hold until we can get going again.”
The good news: Commodities shipped by rail that would affect Vermont consumers most directly — gasoline, diesel, propane, lumber and home heating oil — have been mostly unaffected by the flooding.
This article appears in Jul 19-25, 2023.
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