Bonus Train

Monday, August 6th 2018 was a holiday here in Manitoba. It's called a "Civic Holiday" here, other provinces call it "Family Day" and it's not even a holiday in some provinces. Anyway, I had the day off.

I went out to catch VIA's "Canadian" leaving Winnipeg. It turned out that the first train I saw was CN 8906 West - see above. I elected to catch it at Carman Junction at the curve, to get the head on view above.

The train had CN 8906 / CN 5694 / CN 8823 on the head end.

Westward ho!

After the train passed, I went west to Diamond to set up for VIA. I caught up with some of the train so I amused myself by taking a few shots of the old wooden "Diamond" sign.

Diamond signs are forever, apparently

I hope nobody steals this sign.

VIA 1

VIA Rail Canadian heading west

I got what I came for - VIA 6455 leading the "Canadian" with two other units and 20 cars.

"Glacier Park" was on the tail end.

Prairie Streamliner

Central Manitoba Railway

4002 and 4004 parked on the Carman subdivision

Two Central Manitoba Railway GP9s, 4002 and 4004, were parked on the Carman subdivision.

I noticed this shiny new equipment box in the gap between the main line and the track to the CEMR Carman subdivision.

CN actually owns the first little bit of the track - from the Rivers sub across Wilkes Avenue - before it becomes the CEMR Carman sub.

I didn't see anything happening after that on the CN Rivers subdivision, so I headed for home.

As I drove around the Perimeter Highway, I spotted a southbound CN train on the Letellier subdivision. That would have been CN 532, heading down to the Canada-US border at Emerson to interchange with BNSF.

Bonus train!

CN 532

The dark side of CN 532

I gave chase as best I could. It was hard to catch up to the train through St. Norbert, given the 50 and 60 km/hr speed limits, but eventually I got ahead of them south of the town to get the shot above.

I was on the "dark side" of the train and I wasn't super happy about that. Fortunately, they weren't going very fast, so after they passed by, I gave chase again... this time, at 100 km/hr!

Near Ste. Agathe, I was far enough ahead of them that I felt I could leave the highway and drive the 2 km or so to the track for another round of photos. As it happened, I had enough time to get both my cameras out... one with the 70-200mm "long" lens and the other with the wide angle.

First the long lens. There was a combine working a field nearby, so I included that in the photo. You can see a bit of heat haze, so the shot isn't as sharp as I would like, but I like what's in it!

CN 5693 and a combine

A few seconds later, I took another photo as the train approached.

Storming south

The right of way looks very clean and well maintained, doesn't it?

I love that 70-200mm lens.

I "dropped" that camera and picked up my older T1i with the wide angle lens to capture the train as it went by.

Going wide

The train had a friendly crew who both gave me waves as they went by. Thanks!

One going away shot, with the Viterra elevator at Ste. Agathe just to the left of the train, and the G3 SD40-2 locomotive at far left, on the loop track of the G3 elevator at Glenlea / Saint Adolphe.

Heading south

Here's the video showing all three trains, with a "clickbait" title just for fun.


You might want to read Busy Day - same play, VIA 1 then CN 532, back in 2012!

PS - Important News

It's the end of an era.

This was the last full post that I will write on blog.traingeek.ca.

I've been on the Blogger platform for many years, since my first post in July 2005. After 13 years and 3 months, it's time to move on.

From now on, I'll be writing on my main site - www.traingeek.ca - and the posts will appear there on the home page.

I like the WordPress platform a lot more for writing. I've been thinking about this for a long time, more than a year, and now I'm making the change.

I hope you'll follow me there.

All of my old posts will remain where they are. I am not interested in moving them over!

By the way, there will be one more post, a placeholder to direct visitors to my main site.

https://www.traingeek.ca/wp/

May 5

As I alluded to in a previous post, I saw a lot of stuff on May 5. I was out with the kids, shooting trains and doing kid stuff.

First up was VIA 1, the Canadian, at St. James Junction. Photos are here and here. They had a couple of dead-heading cars that I neglected to mention in my previous post, namely diner Acadian and this HEP 2 car, VIA 4122.

It's always neat to see deadheading cars on the Canadian.

The kids and I headed up Pembina Highway, as I was intending on seeing what was around the CP Winnipeg shops. On the way, I saw an eastbound freight stopped at Subway by the Winnipeg Maintenance Centre, with CN 8003 and CN 5701 for power.

As we approached the yard, driving down Logan Avenue, I noticed a train working a grain elevator nearby. A quick detour brought me to view CP 3106 working the elevator.


I watched for a few minutes, and lo! the train started to roll toward me.

This was not my first time shooting CP 3106!

Continuing on, we ended up at the sports field just south of the shops. We went across the field and I started shooting.

There was a variety of power there. There were a fair number of SD40-2 engines were there, including multimark units CP 5927, CP 6019 and CP 6055.

Red SOO-painted 6062 was there as well, although not in a very photogenic location.

The usual GP38/slug pairs were there, CP 1127/3027 and CP 1128/3028. I'm getting so used to seeing those particular engines that I hardly ever bother to photograph them any more. I know it's crazy, but how many photos of the exact same engines in the exact same locations can you have? :)

The usual few AC4400 engines were around, such as CP 8515.

Also present were ES44AC engines CP 8764 and CP 8823.

Dual-flag SD90 CP 9550 was present, but again was not in a location that I could show the dual flag logo very well. The paint used for the under-cab numbers on the SD90s seems to have been very poor. It seems like every CP 95xx engine has faded numbers.

I spotted new engine CP 9355 bringing an intermodal train in, but it was far away and all I managed was a shot through some trees.

By this time, my kids were getting pretty bored so we went to the playground and had some fun there, then headed home.


As always, you can see the complete day's sightings in my database.