Sometimes, you get a second chance (Part II)

As I mentioned in my last post, there are rare times when your train karma will grant you a second chance. I stumbled across one of those rare opportunities on a July trip to Sarnia last year with my family, when I chanced a last-second trip to the Sarnia rail yard.

In my previous post, I talked about a train heading for the tunnel, the front of which I had missed by seconds. I was disappointed to have missed the shot, but then something unexpected happened. The train began to back up. It didn't back up far enough for me to capture the engines in any meaningful way, but it at least allowed me a few going away shots. The train then inched forward. But then it backed up again. This happened for a while, which had me confused. (Note: I have since come to understand that part of the train was being scanned deep in the rail yard) The train was clearly not backing up to keep a switch to the main line clear. It was sitting over a busy switch at control point Hobson. So it was clear to me there was no meet happening with an eastbound train, since that would require this westbound to back up past the switch.

I stood there wondering what I could get in front of this train legally and safely, without resorting to trespassing (most Sarnia railfans will tell you not to even try this, as the CN Police are quite strict about any incursions onto CN property in the area).

So, I decided to try a last-ditch long shot. And surprisingly, it resulted in a shot I have never captured before. I went to the Donahue Bridge, a link between a south end residential neighbourhood and the northern edge of the Chemical Valley. The bridge actually soars quite high above the descending CN track in to the Paul M. Tellier Tunnel.

Unfortunately, a pedestrian walkway on the tunnel side of the bridge has been closed off for quite some time, which eliminated that possibility. However, on the other side of the bridge, facing the rail yard, there is a pedestrian sidewalk. 

There's also a tiny stub-end city street that is used exclusively for trucks that use CN's CargoFlo service. That street was option number two. Lucky for me, the tunnel-bound train was still positioned at CP Hobson, obviously waiting the green light to proceed into the tunnel and head into Port Huron, Michigan. 

Here's my attempt at a very long shot from the Donahue Bridge. You can see the Sarnia Station, signals and an SD70 on point. On the left side of the photo, you can also see a small piece of trackage that is the Point Edward Spur, which serves the Cargill grain elevator on Sarnia Bay. There's also a great deal of poles and lights in the shot, which isn't ideal, but it gives you the impression of a busy yard. I like this shot, but wasn't entirely satisfied that I had the shot I wanted.

That's when I decided to try a shot from the sidewalk near Union Street, a tiny little dead-end slab of asphalt used by trucks to connect with cylindrical hoppers on a spur. You can see my previous visit to this operation in this post. But for our purposes in this post, here are my two attempts at getting some the CargoFlo infrastructure in the shot. You can also see Sarnia Station, the sign for CP Hobson and the trackage leading up to the CargoFlo operation. That turnout you see will lead you to CN's refuelling pad and the Lambton Diesel roundhouse operations. This area is a no-go, so stay on the nearby road if you want to have a look.

I like how the bushes and the loader eliminate the clutter a bit. Also, this angle means the white sign (look just left of the SD70) doesn't block the view of the engine as it did in my earlier shot. For my second attempt, I zoomed a little closer, making sure not to focus too hard on the loader. I like both shots for different reasons, but in this one, the train is definitely not as clear. And the zoom function is distorting the rails a bit.

Getting the camera to properly focus was a tricky task, as there was so much in the frame. All of these shots taken from the bridge and the end of Union Street are quite busy. You can see Sarnia Station, the CN Hobson sign (white, next to the locomotive) and also the Indian Road overpass in the distance. 

Since I was in the area close to the CSX Clifford Street rail yard, I drove to the end of the street to see if there was anything happening in the yard. I was not surprised to find the area pretty quiet. I was hoping that I might get lucky and happen across some CSX activity, but it was not to be. The CSX Sarnia Subdivision has seen some increased activity of late, as the railway has been carting away materials salvaged from the ongoing demolition of the Lambton Generating Station near Courtright (More to come on that in a future post). That process is expected to continue for a year or more, which means local railfans might expect to see a few different consists on the CSX line, most notably gondolas. I was hoping that I might be able to see something like that, but all was quiet. 

Oh well. You can't have it all.

Sometimes, you get a second chance (Part I)

Rail karma is something I'm sure we've all experienced. You just miss the head end of a train or you get trackside just in time to see the flashing end-of-train device winking at you in scorn as it disappears down the tracks. Then there's the times when you sit trackside and nothing materializes. I can't tell you the number of times I've experienced all three. 

That was why, when I arrived at the Sarnia rail yard for one last chance to see some trains on a family trip last summer, I was disappointed to see a very long freight train slowly making its way west toward the tunnel beneath the St. Clair River. I decided to watch it anyway, to see if maybe there was a DPU unit or some interesting rolling stock.

Then something happened. The train stopped. Then it began to back up. Could this be a second chance for me? Well, yes and no.

Let me explain.

As I was shooting any type of rolling stock I found interesting, I noticed the train was slowing down. Then it started backing up.

The backup move allowed me to snap a few shots of rolling stock, like this CN coil car, with the maroon IHB cover. Again, this was all very routine for me. I was just hoping that the train might back up enough that I could get a shot of the head end. Sadly, it stopped just short of the end of the platform. I walked along a public road as far as I could to get a shot of the two units from public property, but the train was just not cooperating.

This was about as close as the crew came. Over the course of ten or 15 minutes, the train backed up and then moved forward several times. More recently, readers have told me that this is due to the railway scanning its trains before they cross international borders. In this case, it wouldn't back up to the platform or move past CP Hobson sign. So, I decided to improvise and see if I could use the signal gantry near the platform to get some worthwhile shots.

This shot above had the most blue in it, which was nice, since I was shooting after 8 p.m. and the daylight was beginning to recede while the shadows grew longer.

Here's a shot from the platform. I do like the reflection of the setting sun against the side of the train, but I don't like that a pole pretty much blocked out the power from this vantage point. All in all, it was a frustrating few moments.

On one hand, if the train started moving, I had a great chance to get to a vantage point near the St. Clair Tunnel and get my first ever shot of a train entering the tunnel. On the other hand, if the train sat where it was, I was limited in my ability to get a shot from in front of it. After a few minutes, I decided to risk my position at the station, figuring the train was not going to back up and give me the shot I wanted.

I decided to risk getting a vantage point near the tunnel to get ahead of this train. 

But it's never that easy. Railfans in Sarnia know that the pedestrian walkway near the tunnel has been closed for some time, essentially, eliminating that potential spot. That left the Donahue Bride. This bridge provides a link over the tunnel track between the actual residential south end of Sarnia and the northern edge of the Chemical Valley. 

Luckily, there is a pedestrian sidewalk on the bridge, which affords you a long view of Sarnia Yard and the long descending track leading to the tunnel. 

There were two things I had to consider. Was the train in a position where I could see it from the bridge? And was it going to stay there? Also, how effective could my image be, considering how much I had to rely on the zoom function? 

I was about to find out. I'll leave that to the next post. 

Images of the tunnel accident aftermath

This really hasn't been a great year for Canadian National, has it? The railway that just recently had to lease dozens of locomotives just to keep up with an unexpectedly large uptick in demand found itself in the doldrums, somewhat. Of course, everyone knows about the eight-day strike that really clogged up yards and left customers in a lurch in late November. Then there were the layoffs when business began to falter.

But, for my money, the truly compelling story is the messy late June crash of a train in the middle of the St. Clair Tunnel between Sarnia and Port Huron, Michigan. A reader reached out to me anonymously with information about that crash. This reader allowed me to share what they had gleaned, on the condition that I not reveal anything about where this information came from.

So, for what it's worth, the messy derailment was, according to this source, likely caused by an unbalanced load in a gondola car, which derailed on a descent into the tunnel. I have no reason to doubt the veracity of this information, but I will caution that it is by no means an official explanation. So take it for what it is worth.

The crash caused a considerable amount of damage to one of CN's busier transnational routes that connects Eastern Canada to Chicago (via Michigan). The track into and in the tunnel had to be ripped up and the entire right-of-way regraded and relaid. Readers who follow this blog from Sarnia managed to share some photographs with me (taken from public vantage points). I was told the pedestrian bridge that links Sarnia's Chemical Valley with South Sarnia was barricaded to prevent people from watching the construction efforts. Considering this walkway is surrounded by chain link fencing, I have to wonder why the local police and the railway would go to such lengths to hide these activities. Yes, this was an embarrassing accident, but preventing access on a public walking path is unfortunate, if it was guided by anything other than safety concerns.

After round-the-clock efforts for the better part of a week, the tunnel was reopened to traffic, which allowed the refineries in the valley to clear the backlog of cars on their spurs.

So, with the help of some folks in Sarnia, includng my brother, here are a few shots of what happened after the derailment. Some of these pictures were taken from the pedestrian walkway before it was closed off by local police.

The above image is of a road unit with two damaged couplers. I'm told this might have been one of the units in the accident, although I don't know what the head end of this train sustained any damaged or derailments. Take this image for what's it worth. It was indeed taken right after the derailment.

 Another shot of the unit with damaged couplers.

Shot from the Donahue Bridge walkway, this is the main line looking east toward the rail yard. You can see the debris on the side of the tracks.

 That looks like shredded pieces of an autorack, shot directly overhead from the pedestrian walkway.

A fleet of maintenance-of-way equipment ready for action.

This is a shot of the rebuilding efforts from the edge of the pedestrian walkway after it was closed. As you can tell, getting a clear shot of the repair efforts was tough at this point.

You can clearly see from this image that the tracks are long gone, with construction equipment busily working to fix the grading.

This might be my favourite shot. On the evening of the crash, a reader went out around sunset to catch some efforts to pull cars out of the tunnel, including these autoracks. You can also see shredded debris on the lower left.

My thanks to everyone who ended up getting these unique shots. Thankfully, no one was hurt in this accident and everything returned to normal in short order.

The other side: Port Huron, Michigan

Port Huron, Michigan is a transportation hub at the southern tip of Lake Huron, across the St. Clair River from Sarnia, Ontario. Like Sarnia, Port Huron is a great place to watch Great Lakes freighters ply the waters of Lake Huron. For our purposes here, it's also located at a critical point in the Canadian National Railways system. The Paul M. Tellier tunnel beneath the St. Clair River allows CN to quickly transport a number of goods between Toronto and Chicago with minimal delay.

This wasn't always the case. Read about this rail hub's history in my first post about the tunnel. You can also read about the more recent history in the Part II.

Without getting into the history here, I will simply say that the tunnel is a favourite spot for railfanning in Port Huron and Sarnia, although I have to say that I have yet to photograph a train actually going into the tunnel or heading out of the tunnel in my visits to the area. I was talking about this with my brother a while back. Then, a few days later, he was on his way back from the Detroit Airport when he made a small detour to see if there was anything to shoot on the Port Huron side of the tunnel.

His email to me read, "Ask and ye shall receive." Here are some shots he took of an eastbound CN container train headed for the tunnel and Canada.

The Port Huron side of the tunnel is nowhere near as dramatic as the Canadian side, but my brother did manage to capture a few rail bumpers and the Port Huron water tower in this shot. As a comparison, here's a shot I took last December of the Canadian side. You can see the old tunnel beside the new one, which opened for business in 1994. You can also see a CN police cruiser parked on the old right-of-way, which is now an access road to the old tunnel.

Back to Port Huron. My brother parked in the Amtrak station parking lot and tried to get some shots of the tunnel train going into the tunnel. As you can see (below), the station is not all that far from the tunnel (to the left of the Amtrak sign).

The Amtrak station is used as an endpoint for Amtrak trains to and from Chicago. This train is called the Bluewater. The station sees one arrival from Chicago daily and serves as the departure point for one other train, to Chicago, each day. At one point, Amtrak and Via Rail Canada jointly operated a train, the International Ltd., which connected Chicago and Toronto. That was the last passenger train to use the tunnel. Service was discontinued in 2004, due to declining ridership. Here's a shot of a Chicago-bound International Ltd. at Sarnia station in the early 1990s.

Here's a better shot of the container train descending into the tunnel. Some of the container cars only have one container. This was once a much more common site in Sarnia, since the old tunnel could not accommodate double stacks.

Here's an old shot of a Via F40PH-2 6441 with a single stack container car next to it, circa 1991.

Here's the going away shot of the train, as a few cars wait at the 16th Street level crossing.

Speaking of the Amtrak station, here it is, in all its uninspired glory. You will also notice that the Port Huron side of the tunnel does not have the bustling rail yard like the Sarnia side. Still, I'd imagine this would be a good vista to capture trains. You can see a long way off in the distance from here.

Special thanks to my brother for stopping off and capturing this train. I still have to cross a tunnel train off my to-do list, but I guess this will have to do for now. If you want to see my meet with a tunnel train as it left Sarnia yard, check out this post from January.

 



The great disappearing train

Happy New Year!

When people ask me what the Sarnia area is like, I usually tell them, "Picture the prairies, only with more trees." That pretty much sums up the topography where I grew up. It's really flat. That makes chasing and photographing trains fairly easy. The one exception is the approach to the rail tunnel beneath the St. Clair River. The single track leading to the tunnel offers a surprisingly steep grade in an otherwise flat stretch of CN's rail network in this region.

On August 18 last year, I made a trip to the CN rail yard in Sarnia where I was taking shots from various vantage points. When I started shooting, I noticed a large train was being assembled in the middle part of the yard, where the tracks pass under the Indian Road overpass. Seeing that it was not ready to move, I started taking shots elsewhere. A little while later, I found myself at the end of a cul-de-sac, which abuts the yard, since I was trying to get a shot of this train (below). I noticed the train was stopped before entering the yard, waiting for something. Hearing a train roaring toward my spot, I knew a train was heading down the steep grade toward the tunnel.

In all my years of photographing trains, this was the first time I caught a tunnel train.

CN GP9 7270 waits to enter Sarnia Yard. The bridge behind the GP9 is known as the Donahue Bridge, which connects the City of Sarnia to the adjacent Chemical Valley, the area's massive petrochemical refinery district.

Unfortunately, the positioning of the sun and my vantage point made for some tough obstacles. The weeds were pretty high so some shots of the train turned out like the image below. But, sometimes when you scramble, you have to make do with you have.

Happily, getting shots of the train from another angle (below) made for some better shots. I was pretty happy to see that the second unit was CN SD60F 5550, a genuine cowl unit. I have not seen one of these units in many years. An excellent catch.

This is where things began to get interesting. As the third unit in this mixed freight, CN 2635 (Dash-9 44CW) came into view, the train began to disappear. Unknowingly, I had stumbled onto an excellent spot to catch the train's descent into the tunnel. As I reviewed the photos of the train, I was quite pleased to see the way I caught the train's disappearing act.

This shot below captures the grade nicely. You can see the initial string of steel coil cars bound for the United States. If you look closely, you can also see a truck parked beside a covered hopper car at a transloading facility (upper left). You can also see some refinery towers to the left.

I did pan back toward the sun a few times, since the train had so many different types of freight in its consist, including a few shallow gondolas filled with what looked like scrap metal.

This view below brought me back to my teenage years, when I used to watch long lines of autoracks making their way down the CSX Sarnia Subdivision and then being queued up in Sarnia Yard, where they were then ferried over the river on the CN ferry. Of course, CSX no longer handles autorack interchange traffic between Chatham and Sarnia. In fact, CSX doesn't even operate in the Chatham area anymore. I took a shot of the autoracks, just for nostalgia's sake.

Of course, all good things come to an end, but check out the variety at the end of the train. A few high-cube box cars, a lumber car, a white tank car and a few other loaded flat cars, all headed below the river. You can just make out the other train (right) waiting for clearance to enter the yard. I stuck around to catch that train, which turned out to be carrying interchange traffic for two waiting CSX GP38s, which were idling near the Via station. I shared a few shots of that train in this previous post. I will have more to share from that interchange in a future post. You can also make out some longer than usual rail ties, which indicate there was once a turnout located here.

So, all in all, I was pleased to get some decent shots of this tunnel-bound train, given my less than ideal position and the position of the sun. There's always something happening in a big rail yard. I can only dream of similar activity in Ottawa's Walkley Yard.