New Bern, NC - Train in Vain

Another long day on the ICW. We woke up well before dawn and had the anchor up by the time the sun rose. Our plan was to make it from Belhaven to New Bern, NC. This week the Sheraton in New Bern is hosting the Southbound Cruisers Rendezvous, which is a three-day get-together with information sessions for cruisers who plan to go south for the winter. It starts on Wednesday but the weather on Monday and Tuesday is supposed to be kind of iffy so we wanted to try to make it all the way there today - 70 miles. Luckily today's route included lots of rivers with deep water so we could use the autopilot and just set it and forget it. (It's much less stressful when you don't have to worry about staying inside a narrow channel.)

So at the end of the day, around 5pm we are approaching New Bern. To get to the anchorage, you have to pass through a highway swing bridge and then a railroad swing bridge a couple hundred feet apart. We hail the first bridge and the operator opens right up for us. The next bridge is a railroad bridge. Typically the RR bridges are left open all the time except when a train is coming. However most of them are not manned and they operate automatically. Just our luck the railroad bridge is closed. We try hailing the bridgetender (in case there is one) and the other bridgetender answers and says he doesn't know what the train schedule is for the railroad bridge but it always opens up after the train comes through. So we wait. It is fifty minutes til sunset, but the bridge was already closed when we got there so surely the train will come soon, right? We can see the anchorage which is literally a few hundred feet away on the other side of the bridge. Ten minutes pass. No train. Another ten. For a brief instant I see someone at the door of the bridgetender's shack on the bridge. I yell to Kevin to get the binoculars but it is too late, whoever it was went back inside. Nothing on the radio. A guy dinghies by and we wave him over and he says, sure, the bridge was open a couple of hours ago. So now we think the train must be just around the corner. We are a little nervous because if the bridge doesn't open it means we have to go back through the other bridge and find some other, less ideal, place to anchor. In the dark. We have now been waiting for thirty minutes and sunset is twenty minutes away so Kevin goes below to look up the correct sound signal for bridge openings (the plan being to blast the guy with the air horn), when the train guy peeks out the door of the shack again. We frantically wave at him and he waves back. Kevin shouts to him to find out when the bridge will open. He shouts back something unintelligible. I maneuver the boat closer to the bridge so we can hear what he's saying but he ducks back inside. We hear a loud mechanical clank that might be the bridge. Nothing moves. Five more minutes pass. The guy walks out onto the bridge with some tools. He goes back in the shed. Slowly the bridge begins to swing aside. And when I say slowly I mean it takes a full ten minutes for it to open. The guy peeks out the door and waves for us to hurry on through. We look at each other and wonder if he is supposed to even be opening the bridge for us, what if a train really is coming? Regardless, we want to get anchored so we go through and hope that a train doesn't come barrelling down just as we cross. We get to the anchorage and spend another twenty minutes trying to find a decent spot (there are already several boats parked in there). It is fifteen minutes after sunset when we finally shut down the engines and then, only then, does the train appear. If the guy hadn't opened the bridge for us we would've waited for almost an hour! But at least we got through and are anchored and looking forward to spending the next five days in one spot.

Where we are:
Location=New Bern, NC
Lat=35 05.849
Lon=77 02.552