Back to Mortlach

To recap: After my spiritual moment at Mortlach, Saskatchewan, I went to Parkbeg only to find the elevator gone. A little crestfallen, I returned to Mortlach to capture a few more trains before my time was up in the morning of July 14th.

The next train was a westbound led by CP 9621. Since it was still fairly early in the morning, I was shooting against the sun and I didn't expect a really good shot. After some heavy processing, this is about the best that I can do with it.


Here's the video.

I sat in the shade in my van and read a book while I waited. Mortlach is quite a peaceful place and I enjoyed listening to the bird sounds.

I was playing around with the circular polarizer filter on my camera. I want to show you the difference that it makes. Remember that a circular polarizer removes polarized light. It has the effect of darkening skies, removes glare, and saturates colours. I like putting it on my lens in bright, sunny days to make a bluer sky. Some people forget about the glare part, but I want to show you the difference it makes for reflections off water too.

Remember that pond I used to reflect the train earlier in the day? (I used the polarizer here)


Here are two shots of the pond, taken a minute apart, one with the polarizer and one without.

See the difference? The polarizer cuts the glare down and allows you to "see" into the water. In this case it is a bit undesirable as you can see how shallow the pond was and the mud colour shows through. In other cases you might want to see the bottom of the water and a polarizer will help.

The reason why the mud didn't show in the earlier photo is because the sun was lower and didn't penetrate the water as well.

Anyway, back to trains. The third train I saw at Mortlach was CP 8641, heading east. I decided to take a vertical shot for variety.


I did do a landscape shot too.

I didn't take video here, because the batteries in my Canon S3 had already died. Oh well.

After that train passed, I headed back toward Pense. As I passed Belle Plaine, I saw a train headed by CP 8879, CP 6029 and CP 3030 heading east as well. Fortunately they slowed and came to a stop, so I stopped on the opposite side of the highway and took some photos from afar. The crew of CP 8879 dismounted to do the rollby inspection.


Here's the meet with CP 9616.


That was the end of my railfanning for July 14th. Not a bad morning at all! Back to the start

Other Saskatchewan railfanning:

• Along the Stewart Southern (Regina-Stoughton)
• Negotiations and Love Songs (Moose Jaw)
• Dog Catching (Regina-Belle Plaine)
• Regina Sightings
• Evraz in Regina

A Train and a Crane on the Plain

This one has been sitting in the queue for a while... back on May 6 I was out near Diamond west of Winnipeg when I spotted a train coming around the bend. The train itself was fairly ordinary, CN 8879 leading a general freight train with a lot of tank cars, but it was what was on the south track that was interesting.


Yes, that's a self-propelled crane pushing a gondola. Not something I see every day!


In good time the crane trundled closer to me. You can see it was pushing two gondolas and pulling a flatcar.


The fellow driving the crane seemed to be enjoying his job!


CN 50472 is an Ohio model DE 400 crane built in 1976 and it is capable of lifting 40 tons. You can see it in action at Eric Gagnon's excellent Trackside Treasure blog as a pile driver.