of other freight customers centered around Lake Winnipesaukee including the former Laconia Car Co. foundry, Allen-Rogers Mill, [[NESSIE, a combination of the railroad's early reporting marks, NES, and the nickname of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, the "Chessie System") provided freight service solely on the White Mountain Branch until 1984, when it entered talks with Penacook (an exception being the Merrimack Station Coal Plant, which would continue to be served by the late B&M President Alan Dustin to assume switching rights in Concord. An agreement was worked out not only for switching rights in the capital but freight rights on the B&M's Northern Mainline between Manchester B&M and later Guilford coal trains. The New England Southern made its inaugural freight run to Manchester on July 14, 1985, using leased Maine Central EMD GP7 581, on loan from Guilford (which had purchased the Maine Central in 1981 and the B&M in 1983). In 1985 the railroad purchased its first two non-leased locomotives, an EMD GP18, #503, and an EMD GP7, #302, from the bankrupt Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. The locomotives were painted in an attractive green and yellow scheme and went to work immediately. 302 was originally slated to work on the B&M trackage near Worcester with access to Gardner, but that deal fell through when the Providence & Worcester Railroad objected. Access to trackage between Manchester and Boscawen had bolstered the railroad's yearly carloads from 250 to nearly 2,750, much of which was due to Blue Seal Feeds at Bow Junction, and International Salt in Bow. In the late 1980s the railroad was also operating a Reload on former B&M branch in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts for Georgia Pacific, and provided rail-plant maintenance and on-site switching at the SD Warren Paper Mill in Skowhegan, Maine. NEGS also performed various maintenance-of-way contracts around New England, in MA, ME, NH and VT. Less fortunate, was a proposed significant aggregate move from Columbia Falls-Centerville, Maine area, west to deep water near Bucksport, over the former Maine Central's Calais Branch of Maine DOT, which fell through. A 1988 bid on the ex-Grand Trunk line in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, went instead to the St. Lawrence & Atlantic Railroad. In the summer of 1987, AT&T began laying fiber-optic cable along the Northern Railroad mainline from Concord to Lebanon, and the New England Southern was contracted to re-lay ballast along the right-of-way. Dearness had