Miramichi Port Spur Torn Up

In the latest of the "death of a thousand cuts" affecting rail service in northern New Brunswick, CN started removing the rail leading to the port of Miramichi on Wednesday. This prompted Hal Raper, chief financial officer of Miramichi Lumber Products, to complain to CN (and the CBC) that they had plans to ship wood chips and lumber to Saint John starting this spring. CN says the line had laid dormant for seven years and they needed the rails elsewhere.

Mr. Raper said they planned on shipping about 700 cars/year. CN says they will put the rails back if there is sufficient business to justify it.

Miramichi Lumber Products was known as Newcastle Lumber until a few years ago, when the family-owned business went into receivership. It is back in operation with a new name and new equipment.

I don't think the rails will ever go back. The northern line is in dire danger since CN filed for abandonment in August last year and nothing has come up since then to indicate they will change their minds. There is simply not enough traffic to justify CN making the investment to repair the line's many faults. The various levels of government, private business, and community leaders need to work together to get more industries using the rails to make the business case for retaining the line. Organizations like this are good but there needs to be more... much more.



I remember seeing New Brunswick East Coast Railway trains coming down to the port many times to spot boxcars, and even to switch the Irving propane facility there when it still had rail service. I have a note that I saw an SD40 / C-424 combination coming away from the port on February 13, 2001 but in general I only saw RS-18s there. Of course, the above photo is an exception as the second unit after NBEC 1867 is NBEC 4230.

In January 2004 it was a pair of RS-18s (NBEC 1814 and 1821) working the port. Note the BC Rail boxcars. There was a shift around this time from a dog's breakfast of boxcar roadmarks to more uniform CN and BC Rail boxcars in northern New Brunswick.


The last time I saw a train at the Port was in the evening of July 18, 2006 when NBEC 1854 and NBEC 1816 were working. Clearly this was shortly before the end of rail service if CN says the line has not had customers in seven years.


Notice how my camera quality improves with each picture! ;)

VIA Rescues CN

On Thursday, March 7, CN had a small derailment in their Transcona yard in Winnipeg. The lead engine and first car of westbound CN 115 derailed while coming into the yard, blocking the CN Redditt subdivision at around 7 AM. The rest of the train blocked a busy street (Ravenhurst) and the east Perimeter Highway. This also trapped VIA 1 and a couple of freights (CN 101 and CN 111) east of Winnipeg.

Radio station CJOB 68 had their chopper in the air and took some nice aerial photos of the scene. From the photos it appears that there was a sideswipe but I am told it was a simple derailment.

Perhaps the two CN engines (led by IC 2701) were there trying to hook on to the train to pull it into the yard. I believe the derailed engine was CN 8848.

I drove up to see what I could see. I decided not to go anywhere near the derailment site, as the traffic would be crazy and based on the location I would probably not be able to see anything. I drove up Deacon Road to avoid the Perimeter and then headed out Dugald Road (route 15) toward Dugald. Very quickly I found VIA 1 stopped on the main line at Pineridge Road. The strange thing was that they only had one engine.


When I was taking pictures, a taxi came up with a new crew and they boarded the train. There were six deadhead cars on the train.

I guessed that the lead engine had been sent to help clear up the derailment scene, being the closest engine to the incident on the east side. I drove over to the Deacon Road intersection and sure enough, there was VIA 6446 on the end of a container train.


I went to the crossing and watched them slowly pull the train eastward. Quite a pull for a single engine!

Once they had pulled it far enough, one of the engineers dismounted to uncouple from the train.


Once that was done, they headed east toward the Canadian. Note the EOT / FRED / ETD back on the coupler.


They crossed Deacon Road and kept on going.


I hopped back in my van and returned to the Canadian to catch them coupling up.


Reunited and it feels so good...


Note the VIA Rail truck by the crossing.

That was fun!

Other news articles: Winnipeg Free Press , Global Winnipeg

See Also

• CN Derailment on the Letellier subdivision
• CN Derailment Downtown Winnipeg

Return to McAdam

I was in New Brunswick last week, in the St. George area. On Tuesday the 26th I decided I would take a run up to McAdam to try to photograph the station around sunset. It had been 4 years and 5 days since I had last been in McAdam - and that time I never even got out of the car!

I set the GPS for First Street in McAdam and took off.

Of course, my GPS had its own idea of how to get there. I had never gone to McAdam from St. George but I had a hazy notion of taking route 127 to route 3, but that's not what my GPS thought.

I spent a lot of time on route 755 through backwoods New Brunswick. All I can say is that I was glad it was still daylight! I'm pretty sure at one point I did a few kilometres on a gravel road. I crossed the St. Stephen subdivision in Honeydale, then encountered the McAdam subdivision at the intersection of route 4 and route 630. By this time the sun was pretty much below the horizon.

This is facing west, toward the USA.

A few more kilometres of driving brought me into McAdam. I spotted headlights in the yard and it turned out to be GMTX 209 and HLCX 906 (with caboose NBSR 434919) working the night shift.


I've seen HLCX 906 before but GMTX 209 was new to me. The paint looks nice and shiny.

You might notice a railfan peering out at me...

They went down to the west end, out of my view from the station, so I took some stills of the station, then went for supper at Terry's. When I returned, it was totally dark. I shot a few more stills and this one was my favourite.


The engines returned and did a bit of switching near the shop building. Gary got down from the engine and chatted with me for a bit. I did get a still of GMTX 209 at night and I like the headlight effect here.


I hit the road for St. George after that, taking route 4 to route 3 then to route 1. No backwoods trips in the dark!

Plessis Road Underpass

I started writing this months ago but never published it:
Several news items (CBC, Winnipeg Free Press 1 2) came out recently about a proposed widening of Plessis Road in Winnipeg north of Dugald, and an underpass to go under the CN mainline. The city of Winnipeg and the province of Manitoba will each chip in about 1/3 of the $77 million cost, and an application has been made to the federal Building Canada Fund for the remaining $25 million.

Now I see that the city is promising that construction is going to begin for an underpass this spring! Here's the city's information page about the project, or you can jump right to the PDF full of information about it.

Here's the gist of it. At present Plessis Road has two lanes between Dugald Road (a main east-west road south of the tracks) and Pandora Avenue north of the tracks, with a level crossing over the two-track CN Redditt subdivision. You can imagine that the rail line is busy with a few dozen trains blocking the crossing each day.

The city plans to dig an underpass (adding a rail bridge), widen two blocks of Plessis Road to four lanes, add some turning lanes on Dugald Road, and adding some sidewalks / bike paths. The project is projected to cost $77 million.

Plessis Road will be closed during construction for a year and a half. CN will have to build a shoo-fly track running south of the current main line to divert trains around the construction area, much like they did for the Kenaston / Route 90 underpass construction several years ago.


Personally, it doesn't affect me much since I don't live in the area but I'm sure residents will appreciate it. I still scratch my head and wonder why nothing was done when the nearby Perimeter / Dugald intersection was rebuilt a couple of years ago. There the same CN line (single track at that point) crosses the busy Perimeter Highway at grade and can potentially stop 100 km/hr traffic instead of the 50 km/hr traffic at Plessis. I'm puzzled by a lot of things that this city (and province) does and doesn't do.

Sources: CBC, Free Press 1 and 2

Ominous News for the Ocean

VIA Rail's president, Marc Laliberté, delivered a speech to the Canadian Club in Montreal on February 11 entitled "Change, transformation, modernization and collaboration".

VIA's accompanying press release contains some interesting data on ridership on 2011 versus 2012, including some ominous numbers for the Ocean.

This paragraph is particularly damning:
For the long-distance routes, adjustments to the frequency in scheduling that took effect during the fourth quarter improved the performances for the Ocean and the Canadian. The occupancy rate for both of the services reached 67% in November and December 2012, compared to 58% for the same period in 2011. The average number of passengers per train improved on both trains, up from 121 in 2011 to 126 in 2012 for the Ocean between Montréal and Halifax. The Canadian between Toronto and Vancouver welcomed 168 passengers on average in 2012, compared to 148 in 2011. (emphasis mine)

Remember that the Ocean was cut from 6 trains/week to 3 trains/week... yet ridership only improved by 5 people per train, on average. If you believed VIA's rhetoric, ridership per train should have jumped by much more than 4% as people just took the next day's train. What seems to have happened is that people who would have ridden the cancelled trains found another method of transportation.

Despite VIA's words about intermodality, word is that the Ocean is just missing connections with the Maritime Bus service. Let's suppose we want to go from Montreal to Saint John. The Ocean is supposed to arrive in Moncton at 12:45 and the bus leaves at 1 PM. Sadly the Ocean is usually not on time and it misses the bus, which doesn't wait for the train. The connection is too tight. And if you want to grab a bus at Truro to head south... wayyy too late. At least you can catch the westbound train with the current schedule.

Transport Action Atlantic is fighting to raise awareness of the slow death of the Ocean and they need your support. Read their plain words on the VIA cuts. You can start to help by joining them or the national organization Transport Action.

You can read Marc's speech here.

A Lightroom Editing Example

I have been using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 to manage my photos for several months now. It is fantastic and I can't say enough good things about it. What I would like to do today is show you how I edited a photo to produce this:


Here's the before and after photos:


One of the many great things about Adobe Lightroom is that it lists every edit you have done to a photo. Here's what I did to this photo.

1. Crop and straighten. Pretty basic and this should be done on almost every photo.
2. Enable lens profile. This allows Lightroom to compensate for a particular lens, in this case my Canon 18-55mm lens. Generally it compensates for pincushioning on wide angle shots, etc.
3. Adjust white balance. You can see the "before" photo is bluish, very common for overcast photos with a lot of snow. You have to tell your camera or editing program what is "white", easy enough when there is a lot of snow!
4. Shadows. Lightroom has a handy slider to lighten or darken shadows, so I cranked it up to +52 to brighten up the underside of the engines.
5. Contrast and Exposure. I increased both by about 17.
6. Luminance Smoothing. The original was a bit grainy, even though it was shot at ISO 100. The smoothing can get rid of some grain but you have to be cautious not to use too much or you lose all detail. Luminance smoothing is also handy in portrait photos to get rid of some blemishes, wrinkles, and so forth.
7. Clarity. I just love this slider in Lightroom to bring out detail. I was fairly conservative and only used +17 as too much Clarity in snow makes everything look harsh.
8. Saturation and Vibrance. I cranked both of this up some to make the colours of the engine and containers "pop".
9. Spot Removal. I used the spot removal in Lightroom to get rid of the fibre optic warning post in the right of the frame.

It took about 10 minutes but I think these edits dramatically improved a dull photo. What do you think?

Train Tribute Show

"Pete the Rocker" contacted me to let me know of a tribute show he is doing on his "The Shoebox" show on CJSR in Edmonton. Every year, Pete and his son Brian pay tribute to Pete's dad, who worked for the CNR for 48 years as a carman and on the "big hook" wrecking crew. The show will air on February 27, 2013 from 7 PM to midnight (Mountain time). You can listen to them in Edmonton at 88.5 "on your FM dial", live online, or via podcast at Shoebox Radio's web site. Their tribute shows from 2011/2/23 and 2012/2/29 are also on the web site.

Grain Elevator at Meadows Print Special

Hi, I'm running a special on my Fine Art America page. This image of the grain elevator at Meadows, Manitoba at sunset is on sale. This is a stretched canvas print, ready to hang with all mounting hardware included.


You can also have a look at the other prints I have for sale there. Thanks!

My First Trains of 2013

The first trains I saw in 2013 were on January 1, in the morning. I was returning from taking someone to the airport and stopped at the CN Rivers subdivision to see if anything was coming.

I went out to Diamond, and the west-facing lights were lit. TRAIN! I went out to the curve west of Diamond and it was not long before headlights were visible to the west. They turned out to be on CN 8920 leading an eastbound intermodal (with IC 2699 and CN 2242). I took a few shots on the curve and then hit the road.

Fortunately they had a LIMITED TO CLEAR signal to cross over to the north track, so that slowed them enough for me to get ahead of them after Diamond. I took a few shots from the side and then leap-frogged them again.

Note the heavy frost on these engines, on the nose and on the louvres.

Once more I got ahead of them and saw they were meeting a westbound. I tried to gauge the meet as best I could and hopped out to get the shot.

The westbound was another intermodal train, with CN 2336, CN 2537 and pusher CN 8811 on the rear. I processed this in black and white to show the frost.

I sped ahead of the westbound to get this shot right at mile 7. Nice wave from the conductor!


Again I was able to get ahead of the train, just before Diamond.


Much to my surprise I saw an eastbound freight west of Diamond. I "shot the meet".


The intermodal had CN 8811 on the rear. Check out what is written in the grime between the engine numbers on 8811.

Yes, I'm 12 for noticing that and posting it. ;)

The eastbound freight sat there west of Diamond for quite a while, waiting for their light. I think it might have been CN 198 but I don't know for sure. The second unit was BCOL 4641 (in CN colours). After maybe half an hour they started up and crossed over to the north track.


I gave chase as usual. I got the next shot under the transmission line towers. I had been meaning to get a train here, and since I had shot CN 2291 a couple of times already I figured I could "waste" a shot to frame this up.

Right after that I was again surprised by another meet. A westbound intermodal met them near the Perimeter. The westbound was probably CN 101 and had CN 2296 on the head end, CN 8876 in the middle and IC 2709 pushing on the rear. I grabbed a quick shot of CN 2296 but I was able to get a better shot of the middle unit CN 8876 near mile 10.


Finally, here's IC 2709 heading west (left) and CN 2291 heading east (right).


So many meets!

Andy Morin's Train Pictures 1942-1959

Check out this treasure trove of train photos from 1942-1959, taken by Andy Morin and apparently posted by Pierre Morin.

AndyMorinSTrainPictures1942195902-noredirect=1#5596582790499504626

Amazing stuff. It appears to be all Western photos (Alberta and British Columbia) but there are some great passenger and freight trains shown.

Seven Train Day

I saw a fair number of trains on Thursday, January 17... seven, I think.

It started in the morning when I was driving to work. A local CN train was working the cement plant off route 90, in what is known as Fort Whyte. Remanufactured GP9 CN 7254 and slug CN 200 were paired up and working via remote control. I ended up standing on a snowbank to shoot over the fence for this shot.


Note how the sun was just barely high enough to light them up!

EDIT: I was wondering what the "T" on the side of CN 7254 was for. Gord Hilderman of cnrphotos.com kindly told me that "The T stands for Trimmer locomotive, shims are placed between the top of the trucks and the bolster so the pilots and fuel tank don't hit and get caught up in the group retarders at the hump." He went on to point out that there can be an "H" instead like CN 7211 (photo, blog post). Thanks, Gord!

At noon, I went out to try to catch the Canadian. Since it doesn't run on Saturdays during the winter any more, Monday or Thursday are the only days to catch VIA 1. I went down to St. James Junction to wait for them. Soon enough a headlight showed to the east, but it was CN 101, not VIA, coming at me. I stood on another handy mound of snow to shoot CN 2257 leading the train.


That was the sole engine on the head end, and there was no more power until CN 8963 brought up the rear.


Right after that, a CP local came rolling north on the La Riviere subdivision. The light is always wrong for a northbound here, but I did the best I could.


It didn't seem like VIA was coming, so I headed out, but not before catching a glimpse of the CEMR train heading to Carman Junction. It had CEMR 4001 leading and CEMR 5396 trailing.

On my way home from work, I caught a glimpse of a CP local heading south on the La Riviere subdivision at route 90. It had CP 1590 and CP 8205 leading some tank cars for the gas facility near the Perimeter. A few minutes later, I spied CN 2549 East rolling along the Rivers subdivision, so I picked a spot to stop and I snapped this photo.

It had a lot of potash cars on the head end, but the rear was mixed freight. The second engine was CN 2106 and the third was BCOL 4644.

I heard that VIA 1 was coming... very exciting! I headed down to Carman Junction to wait for it. In the past few days a CN maintenance gang has been replacing rail on the south track around miles 8-10 and they were just heading to the stub track just west of the Perimeter Highway. It was interesting to hear the hotbox go off over and over. "CN detector. Rivers sub. South track. No alarms. Speed. 8 miles per hour. Temperature. Minus 19 Celsius."

Soon enough the Canadian's headlights were visible in the distance. They approached, and in a flash they were past on the north track and heading out of town.


It's getting down to the winter consist!


I didn't hear why it was delayed, but I suppose it was held up in Ontario due to the blockades that were held on Wednesday.

Silo Update

There has been an update on the mysterious silos that appeared in BNSF Manitoba's yard.

Winnipeg ordered Fort Distributors to remove the tanks in mid-November. Fort appealed, apparently to council, and on Tuesday the city council's Property and Development Committee voted to uphold the order to remove them. (earlier article)

Fort's lawyer, former councilor Gord Steeves (he was my councilor and my kids' soccer coach, actually), says they will probably appeal. To whom, I am not sure. It seems likely this will go to court.

I drove by the site on January 16th and I see there is a small building at the base of the tanks now.

Rail Blockades by First Nations People

A movement called "Idle No More" has sprung up in Canada, with First Nations people demonstrating over a variety of concerns - land claims, environmental stewardship, and more. I'm not going to get into the politics of it. I am mentioning it because one of their tactics to attract attention has been to blockade rail and road routes. I am not listing every blockade, just the ones that interest me.

Gaspé
On December 27 protesters blockaded the rail line at Pointe-à-la-Croix ("Cross Point" in English) in Quebec. This is the line from Matapedia to Gaspé which is now owned by the Société des chemins de fer de la Gaspésie (SFG, aka the local municipalities). I believe that trapped the VIA train (formerly known as the Chaleur) on the Gaspé side, so passengers were bused along the route. I understand the protesters contacted CN in advance to warn them the track would be blockaded, unaware that CN no longer owned the line.

The blockade was lifted on January 3 after having little effect. I am guessing they didn't realize how little traffic is left on that line.

Truro
On January 11 "Idle No More" protesters blockaded the CN main line just east of Truro, Nova Scotia. VIA Rail ran the Ocean out of Halifax early before the blockade went into effect, and bused their passengers to Truro to board the train to continue west. I believe the blockade began at 2 PM local time and ended after several hours.

Portage la Prairie
On January 16 protesters from the American Indian Movement blocked the CN main line west of Portage-la-Prairie, Manitoba at the Highway 16 (Yellowhead Highway) crossing. A CN freight train was seen stopped near the crossing. They also stopped cars and trucks from using the crossing.

CN swiftly obtained a court injunction against all blockades in Manitoba, but local RCMP declined to enforce the injunction. The RCMP re-routed vehicle traffic around the area but of course they couldn't re-route the train. The blockade was supposed to last "72 hours" but was ended later that night.

I did not go out to Portage but I observed a couple of CN trains (401 and 197) stopped at Waverley Street in Winnipeg that evening, with CN 197 heading west around 8 PM. I expect many trains were staged waiting for the blockade to come down. I don't believe any trains were re-routed via the north line through Dauphin but I suppose they would have been, if the blockade had lasted longer.

Many other locations in Canada were blockaded on January 16.

I have no public comment on the movement. If you choose to comment, please be civil.

McCully Aerial Photos From 1931

Check out these amazing aerial photos of Nova Scotia from 1931. The Nova Scotia Archives holds the Richard McCully Aerial Photograph Collection. These photographs were mostly taken by Harold Reid, owner of Reid's Picture and Equipment Ltd., and the plane was flown by Marty Fraser, an ex-RCMP officer and military pilot.

The photographs are fantastic - the detail is incredible for 1931! The best part about this display is that you can zoom into the photographs to see details.

The Archives acquired the 221 glass negatives in the spring of 2012. The negatives were printed and scanned and they look fantastic.

Here's the Truro yard and roundhouse. I can see 4 steam engines, various rolling stock (mostly boxcars), and quite a collection of passenger equipment in the yard.

Here's the Halifax grain elevators area. Lots of outside-braced boxcars are visible. Just to the left of the centre of the photograph are an old passenger car and an outside-braced wooden caboose!

In this photo of the Yarmouth Cotton Mills you can see a yard with some passenger cars, and just to the right is a roundhouse.

There are some nice photos of Amherst, including this one of the Enamel Heating Plant with the train station in the background.

BNSF Unit Oil Train!

The Irving Oil refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick has been receiving oil trains from North Dakota and the surrounding area. These have generally been coming over NB Southern's tracks as 80-car unit trains, although some oil cars have trickled in on CN via CN 406. Railfans were excited to hear that a unit oil train was coming with three BNSF engines on it. The train arrived at Hermon, Maine on December 29 with the BNSF engines, and ended up parked on MM&A rails for a few days, apparently waiting for a crew.

The train finally made it to McAdam this past Saturday (January 5) at 10:30. Jody Robinson reported that it dropped its train in track 28 and made up another train with the oil cars already in McAdam, then hit the road around 16:15. It was reported through Harvey at 17:00.

Jody Robinson and Gary Bowser did great work documenting the train in McAdam.

The train had BNSF 4649 (Dash 9-44CW), BNSF 9723 (SD70AC), BNSF 7589 (Dash 9-44CW) and HLCX 6332 (SD40-2) for power. Here are a couple of Jody's photos.

I think I can safely say that these are the first BNSF engines to ever visit McAdam... given that BNSF did not exist prior to NB Southern's existence.

Here are a few of Gary's photos, as well as a video he took.

Matt (aka Saintjohnrailfan) caught the train rolling through Grand Bay on its way into Saint John.

The power did not stay long in Saint John. It went west on Sunday the 6th with empty oil cars and some miscellaneous freight. This time both Matt and Dave Dineen (aka nbsrfan) caught the train. Here's Matt's video first.

Now Dave's:

Great work, Jody, Gary, Matt and Dave! Special thanks to Jody for keeping the Facebook RailsNB group updated on the train's progress.