Busy Day

I was trackside a couple of times on July 7 and had a lot of luck catching trains. There were no really unique engines but there were a lot of trains.

I was just east of Diamond at 8 AM and soon enough CN 111 rolled out of the sun with CN 2285 leading and CN 8906 trailing, and CN 2334 in the middle of the train, on the south track.

I was shooting directly into the sun here, so I had to do some significant editing to get a usable photo.

Pardon the incorrect caption at the beginning of the video.

I played with panning shots as the containers rolled by. The trick is to set a shutter speed slow enough to show motion but not too slow that it blurs the target. Here I used 1/10 second.

Here are some good tips on panning shots.

Soon after they passed, I heard them talking to CN 304 so I swung the cameras around to get the eastbound 304. It was led by SD75I CN 5607 and ES44DC CN 2241, on the north track.

The morning sun is much nicer on eastbounds! This train had quite a few CN 197xxx hopper cars, often used to carry gypsum out east.


Soon after that, CN 347 rolled past on the south track with CN 5683 and CN 5763.



Again, sorry for the caption mixup.

So that was three trains within an hour. I left trackside for a while, but I was back by the Rivers subdivision at noon to catch the Canadian... and more...

We Got Ourselves A Convoy

As I said in my previous post, a CN employee saw the lineup coming out of Winnipeg and said, "We got ourselves a CONVOY!"

The first westbound across the diamond was train #105 with CN 2220 and 2656 and a solid intermodal train at 09:51. In this photo the engines have passed the signals protecting the diamond.


Next up was CN 5683 and 2441 with a 162 car merchandise train at 10:08. This photo shows the engines have already passed the diamond and are by the west-facing signals.



My time was up at this point, so I packed everything up and took a few shots of CN Diamond before heading back to the Perimeter. I decided to have "one more look" trackside before going, and to my surprise there was another westbound. Westbound CN train #199 with 5714 and 5242 rolled under the TCH at 10:31 with another solid intermodal train. I don't know the car count because I ran out of tape after the first 50 or so platforms, but they said they had 10,053 feet.

The conductor told the RTC they had a student conductor on board, and sure enough, here he or she is, between the two regular crew members:


I got the "clear signal" to head home so that was the end of the CONVOY for me. Six trains in two hours - not bad at all!