Irvington Welcomes You Traditional Cache
L&N Railroad: The person logging the DNF is correct. This one is gone. A brush cutter had come through the area and everything in the area got chopped, from bushes and trees to road signs. There was not a good location far enough from the railroad to place a similar container so I decided to archive this one.
Please note Use of geocaching.com services is subject to the terms and conditions
in our disclaimer.
Nano Cache at a Railfan Spot
Welcome to Irvington, population one (you), maybe more if there is a train crew waiting in the siding.
While this is a railroad themed cache, the cache is not near the tracks. It's not on or next to any railroad equipment.
You'll need to bring a fine tipped pen or pencil to sign the log. There's no room for fat markers, stamps or stickers.
Logging Request - If you photograph a train while grabbing the cache please post it. This is not a logging requirement.
This is usually a quiet location, but at times traffic can be busy. The road west of the cache towards U.S. 31 is in very bad shape.
Irvington is a named location that no longer has homes or businesses. It's a location name for the railroad and sometimes shows up on weather forecasts when the TV weather map shows where a storm is heading.
This is an interesting spot of railfans. You may see someone parked on the paved area south of the tracks near the crossing, watching and photographing trains.
There is a green sign with white lettering that says Irvington near the east end of the Norfolk Southern passing siding. The green and white colors on station signs is a throwback to the days of the Southern Railway.
There are several small metal buildings next to the railroad. The western-most building houses the electrical equipment for the siding, which controls the signals and switch. There is a tower with an antenna; this communicates the control information. With an appropriate radio (or internet connection) and computer running the ATCS Monitor program you can watch what the signals and switches are doing on the railroad.
The larger building south of the tracks houses the electrical equipment for the crossing signals.
The small building closest to the cache with the antenna on top is a defect detector. It checks passing trains for equipment faults, and then radios a report to the train's crew. If you have a scanner tuned to 160.950 MHz you can listen to these reports. (If you have a scanner you might also want to plug in 160.245 and 160.830 MHz.)
West of the road crossing you'll see a sign that tells crews which operating rule governs them. East of Irvington the railroad is operated using Track Warrants, where the dispatcher radios instructions on train movements to the crew, telling them which sections of track they can use and under which conditions. West of that point the railroad has a section of CTC, or Centralized Traffic Control, that was installed a few years ago when this siding was built. CTC allows the dispatcher to remotely control signals and switches. The train crew follows instructions on the signals, not unlike the way automobile drivers follow traffic lights.
The siding allows trains going in opposite directions to pass, and also allows faster priority trains to pass slower trains going in the same direction. The NS line between Memphis and Chattanooga is primarily single track, with regularly spaced passing sidings. (For most people the easiest to see siding in this area is Elko, across 565 from the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville.)
The signals at this location normally display all red lights unless the dispatcher has set them to allow a train movement. A simplified explanation is that red means stop, yellow means you can go but be prepared to stop, and green means go. (This is a CTC portion of the railroad; signals have different meanings on Track Warrant sections.) The signals are actually more complicated than this. They can convey information about the speed limit, which track you will take when there is a switch, what the next signal may display, and if there is equipment on the next section of track.
You will see a wide variety of trains here, but one of the most commonly seen trains are coal trains. Coal trains travel this line regularly delivering coal mined in Wyoming's Powder River Basin to Georgia Power's Robert W. Scherer Power Plant near Macon, Georgia. Several trains a day deliver low-sulfur coal to this plant, the fifth largest generating plant in the U.S. (TVA's Brown's Ferry, a few miles from Irvington, is number seven.) There is also an empty train heading west for every loaded train heading east. These trains normally have two BNSF locomotives on the front with a radio-controlled pusher locomotive on the rear. You'll also see a variety of other freight trains, including high-priority intermodal trains, mixed freights and short local trains. This is a freight-only rail line. Regular passenger service ended decades ago on this line, and liability concerns ended excursions on Norfolk Southern.
This rail line has its origins in one of the first railroads in the United States. The first portion of the line was built in the Eighteen-Thirties to bypass Muscle Shoals in the Tennessee River, a hindrance to navigation. This line was expanded into the Tuscumbia, Courtland and Decatur, which became part of the Memphis & Charleston which linked Memphis and Chattanooga before the Civil War. This line became part of the Southern Railway near the end of the Nineteeth Century, which was merged with Norfolk & Western in the Eighties to form Norfolk Southern.
Caches related to this rail line include GCG4E7, GCWBJV, GCV3R6 and the now-archived GCJN00.
FTF was by Turrell2.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
zntargvp
Treasures
You'll collect a digital Treasure from one of these collections when you find and log this geocache:
Loading Treasures