Sunday, August 19, 2007

Steve and Dave's Excellent Gaspe Adventure (part 4)

This is the final of four postings about my Gaspe trip on Saturday, August 11 2007 with David Morris to take photos and video of VIA's Chaleur train. (part 1, part 2, part 3)

We decided to go to Perce station to see the Chaleur come in at 15:46.

There were quite a few people waiting to get on.


Next we caught him going under the road at 15:56.


There is a trestle at the west end of Grande Riviere. We went there and got him slowly coming across at 16:17.


Next it was "back to the beach" to get this view from the road.


This time we decided to go into Chandler to shoot him coming into the station. Again, a big crowd waiting at the station at 16:36.


While waiting, I shot a few pictures of the Abitibi-Price locomotive and freight cars at the closed plant.


The freight cars in the foreground have no reporting marks. I understand the mill has (rusty) track down to the wharf, so I guess these were used in captive service.


After that, we went back to my favourite spot at Port Daniel and I shot the train coming the other way at 17:36. At this point it was only 9 minutes late, not bad!


Here he is coming into New Carlisle, right on time at 18:15.


Things went wrong here. They had "bad water" in Gaspe so they weren't able to top up the water tanks in the passenger cars, so they had to do it here. This took quite a long time, and they didn't leave until 18:42.

By the time they got to New Richmond at 19:35 (27 minutes late) the light was starting to get iffy.

They were through Cascapedia at 20:00 in poor light.

We gave up the chase soon after that and crossed into New Brunswick at Pointe-de-la-Croix. VIA 15 had come and gone, so we went back to our cottage for the night. As it happens, we heard CFMG 403 coming in and I did tape it at 23:00 with my van's high-beams providing a little light. CFMG 6907, NBEC 6900 and CFMG 6910 brought 115 cars in.

So ended our trip up the Gaspe peninsula. I can't even count how many locations we took photos of the Chaleur - it is truly the best route ever to take photos of a passenger train.

Next time - our Sunday on CN's Napadogan Subdivision.

See also - our 2009 Chaleur chase!

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