The CP Carman Subdivision

Oh yes, the Carman subdivision, that runs between Carman Junction and Graysville, Manitoba.. oh, wait, you said the Canadian Pacific Railway Carman subdivision? What's that?

Well, I'm glad you asked. The CP Carman subdivision is a long-forgotten section of track that used to run between Elm Creek, Manitoba and Plum Coulee, Manitoba. This was a classic grain-hauling branch line and it served as such until it was lifted in the 1980s.

Early History

Most of this line was part of the original Midland Railway of Manitoba, and it was built from Neche, North Dakota north into Manitoba. The line crossed the border near Gretna and passed through that town and Carman on its way to Portage la Prairie. The line was built in 1906 and purchased by the Manitoba Great Northern Railway on July 1, 1909.

The line was one of three railways from the US into Manitoba, as part of James Jerome Hill's Great Northern railway empire. The others went to Winnipeg (now the CN Letellier subdivision) and The Pas via Brandon.

Apparently the line did not do well. In 1928 the centre portion between Plum Coulee and Carman was taken over by the Canadian Pacific Railway and it became the CP Carman subdivision.

The portion from Gretna to Plum Coulee and the portion from Carman to Portage la Prairie were abandoned and removed.

Elm Creek to Carman

The portion from Elm Creek to Carman was built by the Manitoba South-Western Colonization Railway Company. Well, at least it was supposed to be built by them. The MSWCRC built three lines in Manitoba:

• a line from Rugby Junction (Winnipeg) through Elm Creek to Glenboro, most of which is today's CP Glenboro subdivision;
• a line from Manitou to Deloraine, which was part of the CP La Riviere subdivision and is now all gone; and
• a line from Elm Creek to Carman.

The problem is that the MSWCRC ran out of money before they reached Carman. The line reached Barnsley, roughly midway between Elm Creek and Barnsley, and for a time farmers in Carman had to haul their grain to Barnsley to load there. When the CPR took over the MSWCRC they completed the line into Carman in 1889.

In 1938

Here's how it was in the September 25th, 1938 CP Employee Timetable.

Mile	Station	Siding
0.0	ELM CREEK Junction with CP Glenboro subdivision	65
6.0	BARNSLEY	31
12.2	CARMAN	35
13.2	CN interlocked crossing (CN Carman subdivision?)	-
20.2	GRAHAM	26
24.1	CN interlocked crossing (CN Miami subdivision)	-
24.4	ROLAND	49
29.0	HEENAN	-
32.0	KRONSGART	26
32.0	PLUM COULEE	49

Or, if you'd prefer, here's a scan of the 1938 timetable.

You can see that mixed train service was offered between Winnipeg and Gretna via trains 233 and 234, twice a week. The April 28, 1940 public timetable service shows pretty much the same information.

In 1952

In the next employee timetable I have, the 1952/04/27 CP Prairie (Manitoba) employee timetable, the mileages are the same but many of the sidings have been removed from the timetable. The mixed train was still running, though!

The next several 1950s timetables show no changes.

A great article in Canadian Rail #285 (PDF) says that the section between Carman and Kronsgart was not used since 1964.

In 1973

The April 29, 1973 timetable shows a number of changes:

• No mixed train!
• The sidings are back, reduced slightly in capacity, perhaps due to longer cars in use.
• The CNR crossing at mile 24.2 is no longer interlocked.

The October 27, 1974 timetable is the same except that all sidings show "Nil".

In 1976

The Carman subdivision was downgraded to a spur by the April 25, 1976 timetable:

CARMAN SPUR Westward; Elm Creek to Carman... 15.0 miles. Rule 105 applies. MAXIMUM SPEED 15 M.P.H. PERMANENT SLOW ORDER 10 M.P.H. Carman to end of track.

The spur is still present in the October 30, 1983 timetable.

In 1984

Oddly enough, in the June 3, 1984 timetable, the Carman subdivision reappeared!

It's quite simplified, of course, but it was still there, to Carman and another 2.8 miles past it.

In 1992

The CP Carman subdivision was finally abandoned in 1992.

Today

Barnsley grain elevators

There's not much left of the CP Carman subdivision now. The former Pool elevator in Elm Creek is on the wye that was the north end of the subdivision.

There are two grain elevators in Barnsley that were once on the Carman subdivision.

In Carman, there is a Viterra facility at the north end of town that is on a piece of the former Carman subdivision.

Plum Coulee still exists, of course, on the CP La Riviere subdivision. There is no trace of the line to Carman in the town, although it is pretty easy to trace from Google Maps.

See also

• CP in Manitoba
• Barnsley grain elevators

New Brunswick Rail Route Will Remain Intact

VIA 6400 in Miramichi, August 2007

VIA Rail will provide $10.2 million to preserve the 70 km of rail line between Nelson Junction and Nepisiguit Junction in New Brunswick. Federal Transport Minister Lisa Raitt made the announcement in Fredericton in Monday. Together with the province's $25 million investment, this means that rail access in northern New Brunswick will be preserved... at least for now.

A lot of people worked very hard to convince the federal government, er, VIA Rail to step up. Groups like Save Our Trains in Northern NB put a lot of pressure on local MPs, who in turn "stalked" the Transport Minister to convince her to convince VIA Rail to step in. Maybe not so coincidentally, VIA Rail's interim CEO, Steve Del Bosco, was turfed a week ago and replaced by Yves Desjardins-Siciliano.

Well done, everyone.

The new CEO stated that he wanted to see the ridership grow by 50%. Hey, I have an idea - restore the Ocean to six departures/week. Ridership was cut by about 50% when they went to 3/week. It should double back again...

The mayor of Miramichi, Gerry Cormier, says that New Brunswick now has to use it or lose it. I agree. Local leaders, VIA Rail, and Maritime Bus have to work together to really promote and integrate all forms of public transit in New Brunswick.

Get on the train!

PS VIA Rail's 2013 annual report (PDF) is now available. It shows an average of 1,468 passengers/week on the Ocean and a cost recovery of only 24%. I have to believe that if you restore the Ocean to 6 departures/week, the cost recovery will be better. Some costs are proportional to the number of trains but a lot will be fixed, such as station and station staff costs, advertising (although that's pretty low right now) and so forth. I'd love to see the cost recovery prior to the Ocean cutback.

MM&A and Employees Charged

Associated Press photo, Paul Chiasson

Just over 9 months after the railway disaster in Lac-Mégantic on July 6 2013, three men were arrested by the Sûreté du Québec (the Quebec provincial police) and each will be charged with 47 counts of criminal negligence causing death on Tuesday. The Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway itself also received the same charges.

The three are:

• Thomas Harding, the engineer of the train that rolled into Lac-Mégantic;
• Richard Labrie, a railway traffic controller for the railway; and
• Jean Demaitre, the director of operations for the railway.

It's said that Harding was arrested by a SWAT team, even though his lawyer (Thomas Walsh) had already communicated that he would voluntarily turn himself in if charged.

I'm curious why it took so long to lay charges. It's possible that there is a draft of the upcoming Transportation Safety Board report being privately circulated that contained enough to get warrants for their arrests. I'm sure it'll come out soon.

I'm also a little surprised that more people weren't charged.

EDIT: The Transport Minister, Lisa Raitt, is announcing new rail tanker rules right now, another direct result of the Lac-Mégantic disaster.

References:

• Wall Street Journal article
• National Post article
• Link to the former officers of the MMA here.
• Is Tom Harding a villain or victim?

CN Derailment Today

CN 532 derailed about 5-7 cars around 12:55 today, just south of St. Norbert outside Winnipeg. Fortunately nobody was hurt and the cars did not contain any dangerous goods. Crews were on the scene to start cleaning up. I went there later in the afternoon and took some photos.

The police had one of the southbound #75 lanes blocked so the equipment could park, and the scene was taped off. I was able to shoot a fair bit from the "good" side of the tape. I had a nice conversation with one of Winnipeg's finest about railfans!

This is looking south from the bridge over the La Salle River. There were a few pipe loads involved in the derailment.

The CN boxcar involved in the derailment.

One crane was on site beginning to try to rerail a pipe car.

One lane was blocked off. The backhoe was going in to start digging an approach road to the scene.

One truck of NCIX 1251 was off the rails.

The "big hook" on scene. It wasn't being deployed when I arrived. It was probably waiting for the road to be built.

A view from the south end. You can see two hopper cars (with plastic pellets onboard, according to the news reports) and the CN boxcar.

The derailment scene is at 49.759548, -97.151342 if you want to look it up on Google Maps.


One bystander told me that the rest of the train had been south of the scene, but it was gone by the time I arrived. I presume they continued south to Emerson.

News reports: CBC and Winnipeg Free Press

Grain Elevators of the Letellier Subdivision

I am embarking on a project to photograph as many Manitoba grain elevators as I can this year. So far I have photographed a bit less than 40 elevators but there are a bit over 100 that I have not seen yet. I've created a page / map to track them and I'll be updating that as I go.

As part of that I went out on Sunday, February 23 to photograph the grain elevators on CN's Letellier subdivision. You might recall that this sub runs from Winnipeg (Portage Junction) south to Emerson on the Canada-USA border. CN interchanges with BNSF just across the border at Noyes, Minnesota.

There are 6 elevators remaining on the Letellier subdivision:

• Morris: Cargill (old and new) and Paterson (old and new)
• St. Jean Baptiste: Private
• Letellier: Pioneer

The line parallels highway 75, more or less, so it's easy to access. I set off with the kids in the morning and drove down to Morris. There are four elevators in Morris, two for Cargill and two for Paterson. I photographed the older Paterson elevator first.


To be totally accurate, I had photographed that elevator a week prior when we went down to North Dakota. At that time I did a quick dash in to capture it and then kept on heading south.


The new Paterson elevator is at the south end of Morris, and is much, much larger.




The new Paterson elevator is interesting in that it is served by both CN and CP. I'll show the interesting trackwork in Morris shortly.

The other elevator company in Morris is Cargill. Their old and new elevators are adjacent to each other.


Cargill recently announced that they are going to expand this facility, from 10,000 tonnes of storage and 54 rail car spots to 30,000 tonnes and 100 spots. Exciting news for Morris!

Now, I promised I would talk about the track layout in Morris. Here is a map I drew to show how the track connects.

CN=black, CP=red. I hope this shows how both CN and CP can serve both Paterson and Cargill. Note that the CN Miami subdivision is just a stub and extends just far enough so CN can use it to shunt Cargill.

One interesting thing I saw on the CN Miami subdivision is an honest-to-god semaphore.

This might be the only "operational" semaphore in Manitoba.

The next elevator is the one in St. Jean Baptiste.


The writing on the end says "ASSOCIATION CO-OPERATIVE D'ELEVATEUR ST. JEAN BAPTISTE SUCCURSALE No. 213 SERVICE AU PRIX COUTANT"


St. Jean Baptiste has a lovely, large church.

The final elevator on the CN Letellier subdivision is the Pioneer high-throughput elevator labeled "Red River South". It is located just north of the town of Letellier, which had a Pool elevator until its destruction in November 2006.




So ends our tour... I hope you enjoyed it, and expect to see a lot more grain elevators here this summer.

Black Trailing

I happened to see a few trains recently with a black engine trailing, so I thought I'd post about them.

On April 11 I was out on the Sprague subdivision, southeast of Winnipeg, waiting near Lorette siding to see what might come along. Eventually a mixed freight came rambling along, CN 344 with CN 2260 leading.


The trailing engine was a Norfolk Southern engine, NS 8700, a GE C40-8. I'm told 8700 went to Melville on X401 and came back to Winnipeg on Q114 prior to this train.

I decided to head to the Dufresne grain elevator to shoot it there. I arrived well ahead of the train and got into position. After blowing for the crossing, CN 2260 led the charge past the elevator.


Here's the black trailing engine. I love the look of those Norfolk Southern engines.


344 was a general freight train with a lot of potash cars.

After that excitement, things were quiet for a while until CN 116 came along. This was an all Illinois Central train, with IC 2712 leading.


The black trailer in this case was Illinois Central 1036.


After realizing that both trains had trailing black engines, I decided to go back into my photo archives to see what other "trailing black" trains I've photographed. Surprisingly, there have been a lot. These Illinois Central SD70s have been fairly common around Winnipeg and they do not lead. I found close to a dozen trains with black IC trailers and I'll share a couple here.

This was another all-IC train back on November 29, 2011.


I took a grab shot of this westbound CN freight on October 17, 2013, with IC 1028 trailing.


I'm sharing this one even though it's a bit of a cheat (the black engine isn't trailing exactly), but because it's one of my favourite train photos. This was shot on Louis Riel Day in 2010 (blog entry).


PS hey, did anyone see the lunar eclipse a few days ago? I was crazy enough to get up in the middle of the night to take some photos.

That little dot above the "blood moon" is Mars.

The Napa Valley Wine Train

My wife and I were in northern California recently. I was there for a conference in San Francisco and we decided to have a little vacation and see the redwoods. We went north to Eureka and spent a few days touring. The redwoods are amazing and so are the coastlines. Eureka is the northern end of the defunct North Coast Railroad and there are several Geeps rusting away in Eureka. I think the closest engine was a GP7 and the rest are GP9s.


We spent a few days in and around Eureka and then headed down to Napa. I wanted to see the ex CN FPA4s on the Napa Valley Wine Train. As it happens, we caught up to the Wine Train as it was heading back to Napa. It does not go very fast so we were able to leapfrog it a few times.


I tried to include the surrounding scenery with the Wine Train.


Fortunately there were quite a few vineyards. NVRR 71 and 70 were the power.


I took one video of the train going by.

We left off the chase after that, as I didn't want to subject my wife to any more railfanning while on vacation. :)

I did go visit the shops later that evening to see the other engines. I stored the photos here in a gallery and recorded some information about the Wine Train on my web site.

Foreign Power on the Emerson Sub

One Sunday morning (March 9) I decided to go spend a couple of hours railfanning here in Winnipeg. Nothing was going on and it was a reasonably nice day to get out of the house after a long winter. I did a little tour of the Symington yard area and saw a few trains - nothing special - then went around the Perimeter Highway toward home. As I crossed the CP Emerson subdivision, I saw a headlight to the north, indicating a southbound train.

I hear these trains from my house, but it's rare that I actually photograph one. Sadly I live too far away to see tracks from my front steps! I had to photograph this one. I headed south on St. Anne's Road and then cut back to the tracks on Prairie Grove Road. There's a crossing there, but I figured I had time to get on the other side of the Floodway to shoot the train with the the bridge. I kept going on Prairie Grove to highway 75, then a quick jaunt south got me to winding Hallama Drive, on the south side of the Floodway.

The problem with Hallama Drive is that there is nowhere to park when there is lots of snow on the ground. I pulled over as much as I could, put the 4-way flashers on, and nobody came along... except the train.

As it pulled out of the trees and into view, I was amazed to see a CP SD40-2 leading two CSX engines.


It made a fine sight crossing the desolate snow-covered landscape.


They were not going very fast, so I took quite a few photos. I thought I might be able to get ahead of them relatively quickly, so I headed south down highway 75. The CP track diverges fairly sharply from 75 right away, so I wasn't hopeful for a quick catch, but I figured I could go all the way to Niverville if necessary.

I don't know the area but I decided to try cutting back in fairly quickly. I drove toward what I thought was the track direction, and I came to a crossing and found the train stopped there. It turns out they were going to enter the 8,327 foot siding in Grande Pointe. But first, a little shovel and broom work was required to get the switch to move. Both crew members were on the ground digging away. They yelled to me to pick up a shovel and help! Fortunately they were joking...


I took the opportunity to photograph CP 6029, CSX 442 and CSX 861.


Once they were done clearing the switch, they lined it for the siding and slowly crawled forward. I took a few snaps and then took video from the crossing.

I hope they had a good trip!

BNSF Runthroughs

I mentioned in a previous post that I saw a BNSF engine on the Canadian side of the border at Emerson, Manitoba, and that BNSF has started running power through into Manitoba. I'm going to talk a bit more about that now.

BNSF Manitoba services a number of industries in Winnipeg. One of their major industries is the Paterson elevator at Lilyfield, at the northwest corner of Winnipeg, off Inkster Boulevard. I mentioned this before.


Here's a Google Map view of the area.
The "racetrack" in the middle is the loop track serving the concrete Paterson elevator. It is reachable by CN from mile 11.0 of the Oak Point subdivision (shared with the nearby Prairie Dog Central at this point) and by CP from mile 8.3 of the Carberry subdivision. The odd thing is that BNSF Manitoba has the contract to serve the elevator.

What has happened in the past is that CN brings the traffic up to the Fort Rouge yard on CN 533, then either CN takes it from there to Lilyfield using running rights over CP, or BNSF Manitoba takes it from Fort Rouge to hand off to CP who takes it the rest of the way.

What is happening now is that BNSF is occasionally running unit grain trains with their locomotives on the train to Noyes, Minnesota. There it is picked up by CN crews and run up the CN Letellier subdivison as CN 533, onto the CN Rivers subdivision/CN Reddit subdivision to Symington Yard. There the engines are put on the other end and it proceeds to the Paddington interchange in St. Boniface onto CP track, through the CP yard and the CP Carberry subdivision to the CN Oak Point subdivision. It is run by CN crews in Manitoba the entire way. Thanks to Mark Perry for the information.

On Saturday I was heading west on the Bishop Grandin Boulevard when I spotted a train (CN 533) heading slowly north on the CN Letellier subdivision. I took Pembina Highway north to try to get ahead of the train. I went all the way up to Portage Junction before I spotted the power - 4 BNSF engines! A quick exit onto Jubilee to Osborne did the trick, and I was able to get to the area near the new rapid transit bus station before they did. After less than a minute, BNSF 7630 led the parade.

The engineer was kind enough to open his window to stick his arm out and give me a wave. I appreciate that!

Next was BNSF 5498. I saw this unit in Grand Forks back in 2010.


The third engine was BNSF 1007, with graffiti on the side. It's very rare to see an operating engine with graffiti.


Bringing up the rear of the consist was BNSF 4856. You can see the bus station to the right.


TaylorOver9001 filmed the same train just south of Portage Junction.

A BNSF unit train was first spotted on February 4 (photo in Morris, Manitoba). Another BNSF engine was spotted on February 12 just outside Winnipeg.

I understand there is a possibility that BNSF Winnipeg crews could be operating these unit trains in the future. In December 2013 the Canadian Transportation Agency ruled on an application for interswitching by Richardson International for their Red River South elevator outside Letellier, MB, based on a 1912 agreement between the Midland Railway and the Canadian Northern, predecessors to BNSF Manitoba and CN respectively. CN was ordered to interswitch traffic for the elevator at Emerson. I don't fully understand the ramifications except that interswitching rates are regulated and are lower than commercial rates, so CN would be paid less. CN has appealed.

I would love to read the details of the 1912 agreement. The CTA ruling has some interesting quotes which seem to imply that BNSF could haul directly from the Red River South elevator into North Dakota but could not do local switching along the route, nor bring traffic from that elevator to Winnipeg. Maybe it's good that I am not a lawyer.