Real life inspiration for a fictitious branch

The good news for my model railway in my basement is that the main line works and three spurs are essentially operational. There are rough spots causing derailments and the wiring is about 90 per cent complete. I have a rough idea of a piece of my town and a plan for a railyard and interchange track.

The bad news is I need a tonne of supplies and time (which I don't really have) to complete some of the important next steps. I'm trying to decide what next steps I can take with what I have. But I will share a few details of things I have done so far and give you an idea of where I found the inspiration in the actual railway operations I have photographed over the years.

A bit of context. I am not modelling any actual part of the CSX Sarnia Subdivision. Instead, I am taking elements from both the north and south ends of the line (Chatham had a number of rural agricultural customers while Sarnia had the industrial and petrochemical customers). There were points on the old Sarnia Subdivision that had both the agricultural and industrial customers. I am modelling what I would imagine to be a branch off the main sub that would include many of the elements one would have seen along this operation in the early to late 1980s.

One thing I am proud of is my maintenance-of-way spur that sits next to the mainline near the station.

One half of the MoW consist has an old Canadian Pacific baggage car, which was not an uncommon thing for railways to use during this time. Since the Sarnia Sub intersects with the CP in Chatham, I took the liberty of blending both railways. You will also notice an old wooden TH&B boxcar. Some of these old wooden boxcars lived well into the 1990s as MoW cars. The photo below from the Sarnia end of the the CSX operations gives you an idea of my inspiration. I would love to one day put together a detailed C&O MoW boxcar like the one below, but the TH&B boxcar will have to do for now. It was once part of the CP empire, so it's a stretch, but I am not one for strict adherence to prototypical operations. I like to freelance a bit.

Here's the other end of the MoW consist. It features an old Cotton Belt gondola and a CP flatcar, which I built from an old Ulrich kit. I had to look up this company to see what it was. When I bought this car, I had never heard of this model train maker before. You can see the rooftop of an industrial building in the shot as well. I'm not sure what it is going to be yet. You can also see a short train on the mainline with AT&SF, Bangor & Aroostook, RF&P and a green PC boxcar trailing a set of F units. All of these boxcars, except the PC, were given to me last year by a friend who had them in his basement collecting dust. What a gift!

Here's a closer shot of the CP flatcar. It took a lot of work to put this 60-year-old car together and get it operational. The couplers that it came with I had never seen before. I had to put in a conventional coupler and modify the car a bit to get it to fit properly.

Here's a shot of a MoW gondola I saw once in Sarnia, which gave me the idea that I needed one on my own maintenance track.

Here's a final shot of the mainline train and the station spur, below. You can get an idea of the developing town from this angle. There are a couple of things to note in this shot.

One is I bought an extended platform kit for my train station but found that it wasn't needed for what I was modelling, which is essentially a small town. So I used the extra platform for a railway themed park across the street from the station.

The next thing is the Chessie System F unit. You will see that it is mated to an old vintage Canadian Pacific unit, which needs a lot of work to make it look a little more realistic. Again, the old CSX Subdivision from my youth did not include shared power, but there were instances in Southern Ontario, particularly in the case of the CASO Sub near Windsor, where shared power did happen. So, it's another liberty I am taking. To be honest, I was just testing the old CP dummy to see how it handled the tracks. It has a temperamental coupler in the back, but it's working really well so far.

Try as you might, you will not find any real world example of a Chessie-painted F unit. I looked into it and discovered that the Chessie System did not retain any F units for revenue service, so this F unit is someone's idea of what it would have looked like if the railway had saved any of the covered wagons from its predecessors' long gone passenger service. The closest thing I found was that the old Seaboard System retained a set of F units long after it gave up its passenger operations.

You will also notice that the station is sitting on a block of wood. It will, of course, be elevated from the town, much like the Guelph Via Rail station is situated well above that city's downtown. The station is a common kit from Atlas. I like the look of it, since it reminds me of the old C&O station at the foot of Clifford Street in Sarnia, nestled behind the Esso refinery. The station looks different these days. Back in the early 1990s, it looked pretty rough. My station is a bit more tidy, for sure.

So that's one part of my set that could be close to getting some scenery in the near future, since it is pretty much set from a functional point of view. There is another part of that spur, which will serve a small farming operation. The building itself (you can see a piece of its power in the second last shot) is an old lumber mill, but it's generic enough that it can double for just about any old industrial building. I'm hoping to convert it into a feed mill, so I can use my hoppers and cylindrical hoppers there. That's a topic for another post.

Last glimpses of CSX? I hope not

Lambton County 2017 Part I

For a railfan continually frustrated by a lack of success in Ottawa, I was thrilled to enjoy some good luck along the CSX Sarnia Subdivision on a recent trip south to visit family in the Sarnia area. My family was staying at my sister's house. My sister and her husband own a two-acre property that backs onto the Sarnia Subdivision. I was determined to catch something along the subdivision while spending the week there.

One afternoon, as my daughters were napping, I took a walk to the back of the property, which I often do when I'm there. The railway is not separated by fencing or anything else. What's more interesting is that the right-of-way barely crests over the surrounding land. It is almost level with surrounding properties, at least near milepost 64.2, which is where my sister lives (MP 64.2 is actually the Rokeby Line level crossing).

As I was making my way to the back of the property, I thought I heard a distant horn but as I waited for it to repeat itself, I heard nothing. I began walking back to the house when I heard the familiar horn much louder. It was the unmistakable sound of the train crossing Rokeby. I raced to the back of the property and set up a fair distance from the tracks, as I wanted to get a wide shot.

This is what I saw. Two GP38-2s, one in the older CSX paint and one in the newer container logo scheme, emerging from behind trackside scrub.

I find it an incredible anomaly that a railway still operates though an area with no barrier whatsoever. For a railfan that knows the rules, this is a great advantage. Clear sightlines!

Here's a closer shot. The sun was high and bright, which made the shots a little tricky, but nothing that a little photoshopping couldn't solve.

This (above) might be one of my favourite shots from the last year. This is old-school railroading that reminds me of my childhood. No fencing, no signals. Just one track, controlled by track warrants. However, unlike the trains that I saw on this line in my youth, the trains using this stretch of the sub are sadly very short and one-dimensional.

Still, this was the first time I caught a train on this subdivision since 1991. I took as many shots as I could, just so I could savor the moment. Here's a shot of 2799 heading into the cover of spruce trees that line the tracks at the back of my sister's property.

True to my recent vow to document rolling stock a little better I took a photo of the train's tank car consist. This was pretty much the entire consist, sadly. The majority of the load was liquid carbon dioxide coming back to Sarnia (CSX also transports liquid oxygen south of Sarnia along this line, which goes just past Sombra at present). I wasn't able to read what the final tank car was carrying.

The best part of this spot on the line is you can walk right up to the right of way and get a dramatic shot like this (no end of train device!). I was happy to get this image because it gives you an idea of how small the CSX operation has become outside of the Chemical Valley.

Most of the railway's business outside the valley has dried up. I wonder how long it will be before the line outside the valley is abandoned or possibly sold off to CN, which operates the parallel (and extremely busy) St. Clair River Industrial Spur, which extends all the way to the Bickford Line, where it serves the Terra nitrogen products plant.

The reason I will savor this meet is because I can imagine what the fate of this line will be under Hunter Harrison's leadership of CSX. Given that many of the customers along this line have dried up (Dow Chemical, Polysar, Ethyl and several others are long gone) while new prospects don't seem to hold out enough promise to justify any further investment in this line.

There are many ideas for what should happen at the Dow Chemicals and Ethyl sites in the valley, nothing has happened yet. There is a bioproducts industrial park taking shape at the old Polysar site and a cogeneration plant at the old Dow site, but the spurs into these old sites are basically not in use.

CSX still has business in the valley, as it serves the Esso, Shell and Suncor refineries, but aside from these jobs, there is little else to sustain the sub. The south end of the sub has been abandoned from just south of Sombra to Chatham, which forced the City of Chatham-Kent to try and find an operator to serve the agricultural customers on that end of the line. After several years of searching, no operator has been found.

Surprisingly, the tracks on the abandoned part of the sub still seem to be in good shape, or least in the Port Lambton area, anyway.

Even as far back as 2005, there were rumours that CSX was going to turn over the majority of the Sarnia Sub to CN, although this has not happened. I wonder now if the site of CSX trains through my hometown will be a thing of the past.

Old stone milepost 63 at Emily Street in Mooretown on the CSX Sarnia Subdivision.

If so, I'm glad I was able to capture some images of this railway, whose history stretches back generations, and several predecessor railroads, in Lambton County.

Bittersweet Homecoming

This was not the homecoming I had imagined.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I made a very brief visit to Sarnia, Ont. While there, I made a quick visit to the yard at end of the CSX Sarnia Subdivision. I had been looking forward to this visit for a while, since I had not had the chance to shoot anything along this line since my teenage years in the 1990s. I should back up a bit. Just before I made my trip, a Beachburg Sub reader mentioned to me that CSX Transportation had officially discontinued service on the Sarnia Sub between Chatham and Wallaceburg. He mentioned that he saw the last train leave Wallaceburg, on the southern end of the line.

Above: GP38-2 2011 in Chessie colours idles on the main line just outside Corunna, leading a manifest freight in April 1991

This wasn't all that surprising to me, but it was nonetheless disappointing. A 42-km section of the line has been purchased by the City of Chatham-Kent, which has a side deal with Canadian Pacific to sell it the rail assets along the corridor. What this means is the municipality is paying CSX about $4 million for the line and its assets and turning around and selling the rails and ties to CP for $3.2 million. For the time being, CP is not pulling up the rails, which has given the municipality time to find a shortline operator. A good summary of the situation can be found at the Chatham This Week website. This is an all-too-familiar story for me, although Chatham-Kent seems to be more interested in saving an active rail line, compared to Ottawa, which seems to have no vision for the Beachburg Sub within its borders.

With this in mind, I made sure to capture some action on the CSX line while I still could. The weather on the Sunday over the Thanksgiving weekend could not have been any better. Here's a shot of a stable of GP38s at the end of the line, tucked behind the Esso refinery in south Sarnia's Chemical Valley. Compare these to the old Chessie GP38 above.

Above: GP38s at the end of the CSX Sarnia subdivision, at the foot of Clifford Street on Oct. 13, 2013

The article in Chatham This Week pointed out that there are still some farm businesses along the CSX line in Chatham-Kent, but the sad reality is the area has lost a number of its manufacturers in the last 20 years including a Louisville hockey stick factory, a Nestle plant, a Libbey Glass factory and a number of auto parts or tool and die shops. Many of these businesses used the line for shipping, since parts of this municipality do not have a terribly close connection to a major highway, especially Wallaceburg.

Above: First generation CSX paint scheme on a GP38, just outside Corunna in April 1991.

What this means is that the Sarnia Sub will likely be a very compact line serving petrochemical companies in the Sarnia area and communities to the south. The site of manifest freights with boxcars and autoracks is now a distant memory. Besides the loss of the manufacturing sector in this area, this line was also hurt by the new CN St. Clair Tunnel and the expansion of the Michigan Central Railway Tunnel in Windsor, which was expanded shortly after the opening of the new Sarnia tunnel. Since both of these tunnels began handling autoracks in 1994, this essentially eliminated all autorack interchange traffic on this line, which was a major source of freight on the line until the early 1990s.

Above: This made my trip to Sarnia worthwhile. Two CSX bay-window cabooses, one with CSX Operation Redblock paint, sit at the tail end of a cut of cars along the CSX Sarnia Sub in the Chemical Valley. More on these beauties in future posts!

I will keep an eye on this situation, although I do encourage readers to continue to update me on what they see down in this part of the province. I can't help but wonder why so many shortline operators can find success in the United States while rail lines like this one, and the Beachburg Sub, continue to languish in Canada, much to the chagrin of local industries crying out for rail service along abandoned lines.

It strikes me that the Class I railways in Canada have become so good at being Class I railways, they have forgotten or willfully neglected the quieter branch lines along their networks.