From Cambridge to Waterloo via Paris and Plattesville

Yesterday we moved from our Cambridge daughter's place to our Waterloo daughter's. It was a beautiful day, so we took the scenic route, over to Paris for a Mary Maxim fix, then on to Waterloo via Plattesville. Being a holiday weekend, it was a good day to keep away from the main roads.

Along the way near Ayr, we noticed a large number of cars parked near the road:

It turns out this is a landing/distribution area for new autos unloaded from trains, likely destined for relatively local delivery. Wish we had a drone, as the picture just hints at the number of new cars parked here.

When we poked around the site, we came across the unloading operation. Several rail car carriers were parked off the main tracks:

Double-decker carriers, full of autos

They were setting up a mobile ramp to unload the top level of one of the carriers. It took several minutes for them to get the track aligned properly. This seemed a really slow process, that would have to be repeated for each line of carriers and each carrier level.

Once aligned and connected, the crew started driving the cars out of the top level of the carrier:

The rail cars in a given line are inter-connected with ramps, so all the cars for one level can be unloaded without changing the ramps.

Something different, and it surprised us how slow and manual the process seemed to be.