CSX Railroad - Westfield, Mile Post QB108 |
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 CSX Railroad - Westfield, Mile Post QB108 |
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Feed Notes
Monitored Frequencies:
160.800 MHz - CSX Road Channel
160.560 MHz - CSX NC Dispatcher Jacksonville, FL
161.070 MHz - CSX Yard 1 West Springfield, MA (teporarily blocked)
160.860 - CSX Yard 2 West Springfield, MA (teporarily blocked)
452.9375 Mhz - Head-of-Train telemetry (teporarily blocked)
Webcam located at QB108: http://www.westfieldwebcam.com or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCiXSO_JIRk at https://www.youtube.com/c/BostonandMaineLive
Railfan Cam at Westfield Bridges, Massachusetts USA - LIVE
Status as of Summer 2022: HOT telemetry frequency has been temporarily deleted from the scan set. The current practice of parking M424 on Track 2 for days on-end results in many meaningless HOT telemetry hits.
Background: The scanner can normally receive signals from about QB99 (East end of West Springfield yard) to about QB110 (2 miles West of the center of Westfield). Trains can be heard calling the signals at the interlockings at CP109 and CP105. The Yard Office in West Springfield and the NC Dispatcher (NC located in Jacksonville Florida) can be heard on the base stations located at CP109 and WestSpringfield Yard. The Damaged Equipment Detector at QB103.6 can be heard when the foliage is off the trees. Reception of the End of Train Telemetry signal usually means there is a train (does not apply to passenger trains) within a mile or two of the scanner. Sometimes this is L009 working the yard at Westfield (Springdale) or dropping/picking up cars at Pioneer Valley RR. Reception of the EOT signal is a good cue to have a look at the webacm located at QB108 to see if a train is passing. (This camera also captures some pretty spectacular sunsets.) Since the line between QB109 and QB123 is single track, sometimes westbound trains will wait at QB107 (Williams Riding Way) for an eastboud to clear the single track and you will hear the EOT signal transmit for about one second, about once a minute while he is there. They wait here because the tail end of a long WB train (12,000-feet plus) will block Williams Riding Way if they pull up to the signal at QB109 to wait for the eastbound.
Although signal strength may be good to excellent, the audio quality (audio amplitude) may vary widely. Base station audio is normally loud and clear. However, the audio from Locomotives and handheld radios can sometimes be a challenge. The amplitude of the audio is dependent of the FM deviation of the RF carrier and with today's narrowband FM radios, this adjustment can vary widely from radio to radio. I have been within 500 feet of a locomotive radio with his RF signal banging the stops, but the audio all but unreadable ( a wisper) due to insufitient deviation in the FM carrier. It also becomes even more of a problem if the speaker does not talk loudly enough into the mic.
Feed Technical Details: The radio is located in Westfield, Massachusetts near the CSX Berkshire Subdivision main line near milepost QB108, approximately 100 miles west of Boston, MA. The feed scanner is a Uniden BCT15X. The computer is running the free RadioFeed app from ProScan.org which uploads audio in real-time to Broadcastify.com. There is a delay of approximately one minute between reception of a transmission at the scanner and posting of the transmission on the Broadcastify site. Feed archives contain the recorded audio and are posted with the dead-time between transmissions removed (a real plus!). Real-time listening is free. However, a Braodcastify Premium Membership is required for access to the archived files. The current antenna is the TrainTenna Blade indoor antenna from DPDproductions.com providing as much as 3dBi of antenna gain. In the past, other indoor installations have been configured with an Arrow II Back Pack Portable, Model 161-4BP antenna, a 4-element Yagi which provides in the neighborhood of 10dBi gain. This antenna is a special order from Arrow, cut to 161 MHz and is a variant of the Arrow 146-4BP antenna.