Friday, April 22, 2011

CN Eight Naught Naught Naught

CN 8000 and 2256 on the Floodway
On April 16 I was over around CN Symington and shot a few trains. As I approached the area on the Perimeter Highway I could see that a freight train was pulling out of the yard to head south on the Sprague subdivision. I wanted to shoot them on the Floodway bridge so I took the Kenora exit and parked just north of the Floodway.

As it turns out, the lead unit was CN 8000.
CN 8000

The Floodway is open and working hard to keep the Red River away from Winnipeg.
CN train over Floodway

Contrast that with this shot of the Floodway from September 2010.
CN 8822 in Winnipeg
I imagine the Floodway is even more full now. I plan on going out this weekend to see how high the flood waters are.

The train was going fairly slowly so I headed south on the highway to get another shot. I didn't want to get it at Deacon's Corner because I would be rushing the shot, so I took the next crossing after that and waited.

By the time the train reached me, it had picked up some speed. These red winged blackbirds weren't sticking around to watch the train!
CN 8000 and birds

CN 8000 nose

A nice wave from the conductor, then they were on their way. "Clear signal at Lorette."
CN 2256 and a green signal

2 comments:

Blair Ivey said...

Have you considered making a map with your post locations marked? It might be interesting and perhaps useful to anyone who happens to find themselves in the area.

Canadian Train Geek said...

Hi Blair, great idea! Almost all of my photos are tagged with the location. Click on the photo in the blog post and you will see a larger version. On the left side you will see two links: "View Album on a Map" and "View in Google Earth". The former is for all the photos in the album and the latter is only for the photo you're viewing.

If you choose the former, you will see a map with pushpins for each sighting. Hover over a push pin and it will show the title and date.

I should really do a blog post explaining this so people will know how to do this.