The inside scoop on the Arnprior local

It seems as though every time I blog about this little runt of a train, which travels once a week out to Arnprior via the Beachburg Sub and the Renfrew Spur, I get loads of responses. I have come to realize that a great number of my readers here in Ottawa watch out for this train every week, many of whom come away empty handed, due to its inconsistent appearances in Bells Corners, Kanata and other stops along the way to and from Arnprior. Well, I was surprised to receive a detailed message about this train in the comments section of my previous post about the Arnprior local.

  

Before I get to the comment, I need to confirm that, yes, the above image is one of many I captured in my first proper meet with the Arnprior local. I caught up with the three-car consist recently at the Trans-Canada Trail level crossing near Corkstown Road and Highway 417. However, I will save this for a future post. For those interested in a good, safe spot to shoot this train, I highly recommend this spot.

 

So, back to my original point. All of our conversations about CN's Wednesday train out to Arnprior attracted the attention of Ian McCord, former car controller for the Ottawa Central Railway and Yardmaster for CN. Here is his comment in full, in case you missed it:

 

The product in the tank cars is Caprolactam. It takes hours/days to unload with the aid of steam as they are basically rolling popsicles.

Nylene has 2 tracks with 3 unloading stops on each. The train crew has special spotting instructions for each car so it could take some time to do all the moves.

In my time at the OCRR and CN, the plant has changed hands 3 times: BASF, then Honeywell Nylon and finally Nylene. The DBCX cars are owned by BASF and the product normally originates at a facility in Texas but some cars are loaded in Georgia. In the 2000s, the longest trains had 7 tank cars and at one time Honeywell would load one or 2 covered hoppers a week with leftover nylon which was shipped to another Honeywell plant in the US.

As for the train's departure time, it is affected by the amount of switching to be done at Walkley Yard as well as the tiny window of time between the O-Trains at the Walkley diamond. The old O-Train schedule had our times for a signal out of the yard at 08:57, 09:12, 09:27, 09:42 etc.

So, there you have it. This is the best information I have been able to get about this train. Special thanks to Ian for reaching out and sharing his information. I'm hoping this will give local watchers some better information to use when they are trying to capture some shots of this train, like I did recently. And for those interested, it crossed Corkstown Road around 9:05 a.m. when I caught it recently.

And for readers outside of Ottawa, who may be a little less interested in this chase saga, I hope you will enjoy my upcoming shots of this train, which I captured recently. I will try to keep that post more generally focused. Stay tuned.