Catching up with the contributors

I don't know if I can properly describe how important it is for my blog to have regular or even semi-regular contributors. When you live in Ottawa, your railfanning opportunities are limited, to say the least. Although there is no shortage of news coming out of Ottawa right now when it comes to railways, I always feel as though I am cheating myself and the readers when there aren't any compelling images to go along with the topic I am exploring.

All that to say, it is always a great surprise when I get photos and news tips from my fellow rail enthusiasts from Eastern Ontario and elsewhere. This week, I thought I would play a little bit of catch-up and present some of my favourite contributor images from the last year and a bit. I have to admit, I have a large backlog of submitted images. Unfortunately, I can't always use them right away and sometimes I can't fashion a full post out of the contributions.

But that always leaves the door open for collections of random photos, which is always fun for me. For the first photo, let's head overseas to Portugal.

My in-laws spent a few months in Europe last spring, in Spain and Portugal in particular. They were nice enough to take train photos for me, including a number of shots from a railway museum they visited in Spain (stay tuned for that post). This shot, from the Lisbon train station, gives you a good idea of the iconic design of the station's platform and canopy. I also liked this shot because the engine reminds me of the old Bombardier LRC locomotives that once prowled the Windsor-Quebec City corridor for Via Rail Canada. My in-laws took trains just about everywhere they went during their European adventure and spoke glowingly of the passenger service there.

Take a guess where this shot came from? That tower in the background is the Calgary Tower. This shot is courtesy of my brother, who snapped a shot of a long line of hoppers parked in Calgary's downtown. He took this shot in the summer of 2016. I haven't really had any opportunities to include any of his Calgary photos in a post, so I figured I would share this shot, more for the Calgary skyline than anything else.

This shot is courtesy of fellow Ottawa railfan Keith Boardman, who snapped a few images of the old Masson passenger station in Masson, Que. This station, which appears to be in terrible shape, sits along the Quebec Gatineau Railway, although most people know this line better from its time when it was part of the Canadian Pacific Lachute Subdivision. This line also hosted Via Rail's northern service between Ottawa and Montreal, so called because the line runs north of the Ottawa River.

You can read more about Via trains along the Lachute Sub in this post on Trackside Treasure.

As Keith pointed out to me, it's been decades since this station saw any passenger service. It doesn't appear as though there are any efforts to preserve the old station. I like this shot because it shows just how well maintained the tracks appear to be, which can't be said for the station, sadly.

My brother snagged this dramatic shot of a CN freight headed west toward Sarnia on the Strathroy Subdivision. This shot was taken at the Mandaumin Road level crossing in January. My brother mentioned the other day how he saw a freight train being pulled by four locomotives that all bore different logos: CN, NS, UP and CSX. Reading up on why, it appears that CN has leased some power recently to keep up with an unexpected increase in freight traffic. One article I read was critical of the railway for not being ready for the rebounding traffic. I don't care about that. I find the prospect of being able to see UP, NS or CSX engines on CN freights to be exciting.

One final note. Radio-Canada has reported recently that the Bytown Rail Society has reached out to proponents of a tourist train on the old CP Maniwaki Subdivision. The society has offered some of its equipment for use in a new tourist operation. There has been no tourist train on this line in years, thanks to wash-outs along the right-of-way that have proven too costly for the rail's owners to fix. The old sub is owned by the municipalities that the line runs through. The article, in French, mentioned that the idea might not receive a warm reception, since efforts have already started to convert the old Maniwaki Sub into a recreational path.

Postcards from Alberta

In the first year of this blog, I shared two posts from a trip I made to Alberta in 1992. You can read about my railfanning adventures in this post and this post. That trip was a great experience for me because it was the first time I travelled on my own, even though I wasn't even 16 years old yet. From a railfanning perspective, this was one of the first times I specifically set out to take photos of trains and I'm glad I did. I was able to get photos of a CP grain train, the Rocky Mountaineer and the Lake Louise train station. These are among my favourite rail photos, more than 20 years later.

Recently, I was going through a number of old items that had been packed away when I discovered three postcards I bought while visiting Heritage Park in Calgary with my aunt, uncle and grandfather (the one who worked as a labourer in the Crowsnest Pass region). I figured I should share them and bring to a conclusion my series on Alberta, years later.

The first postcard features a shot of one of the park's former U.S. Army 0-6-0 steam locomotives (2024 in this shot, the other is 2023). The engines were in use as late as the 1960s in British Columbia for Pacific Coast Terminals' switching operations.

The railway is a big part of this history museum. The historic village has a number of railway items on its grounds, including a sand house, roundtable, roundhouse, water tower and railway station. The railway itself operates on a 4300 foot loop and comprises three locomotives and 30 pieces of assorted rolling stock. It's been so long since I've been there, I can't really offer many insights into this railway other than to confirm that I rode this train and enjoyed the experience.

Here's a postcard that should be recognizable to just about any Canadian railfan. This is a shot of the CP Rail photo freight, which was staged a various sites around Canada at the time when the Canadian Pacific Railway adopted the action scheme and rebranded itself CP Rail in 1968. This shot, I learned, was obviously staged at Yoho at one of the famous spiral tunnels that the railway used to ease the grueling grade that trains had to mount to make it through the Rockies. This train was broken up into two pieces for this photo. The railway also took pictures of this train along the shore of Lake Superior and in the Laurentians in Quebec. The lead unit, 4242, was sadly never preserved and was scrapped when it came to the end of its life. Kinda sad that the railway never bothered to save the first unit painted in the action red. Here's a good piece of trivia. Can you identify the use of each of the boxcars you can see (red, yellow, green, blue)? I ask this because I couldn't without researching it online.

And one final postcard from the trip. This one is a collage of trains in the Rockies, including that famous CP photo freight, but you can also see a Via Rail triple header (all F units), a Via Rail train being helped by a CP high hood geep and a CP mixed freight that is not quite as photogenic as the photo freight.

I know that I had these postcards displayed with my train photos in an album for years before I scrapped that album. I'm glad I kept them all these years later. If only I had been so careful with some of my own railway photos from this time.