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. 

A brief glimpse of a tunnel train

So I can finally share the remaining photos of my trip to Southwestern Ontario, with this one final post. If you've been following along with my recent posts, you know that I had a couple of interesting encounters with freight trains along the Strathroy Subdivision this summer, one at Mandaumin Road and another at Camlachie Road. There might actually be one more post of odds and sods from my summer wanderings, but this last post is pretty much it.

This summer, I spent a week playing chauffeur and defacto camp counsellor to my two daughters and my nephew, a train fan. So, at the end of the week, after I had taken them to a downtown museum, I made sure to take a quick peak at the rail yard, since it is not too far from the downtown. When I arrived, I was treated to this site.

Three large diesels appeared to be positioning cars in the yard for a run down to the St. Clair Tunnel. Or possibly this was just routine switching, but my guess is this was a pre-tunnel movement, given the size of the consist that was being maneuvered. Anyway, the harsh sun wasn't doing me any favours, but there was nothing I could do. This is the only legal spot to take photographs of the yard. Sadly, it is almost always like this in the afternoon. I decided to get a shot with the gantry prominently featured.

I made sure to take an up-close photo of the logo on the nose of 3163. The crew inside the cab didn't seem all that fazed by my presence. You can also clearly see the railway coding beneath the number. Can someone share what EF-444zc means? I seem to recall someone saying somewhere that it has to do with where the engine is serviced? Is it also an internal CN way of labelling its diesels outside of the manufacturer model name?

This was also a cool catch. CN doesn't have all that many leased units roaming its system, judging by the reports I've read about its business slowdown. This unit was the third in the lash-up. Look at the exhaust fans at the rear! This shot really accentuates just how large they are.

This lash-up seemed like a lot of power for switching, which made me think the crew was putting things together for a run through the tunnel. Although, true to the PSR way of railroading, even the crews of the mainline freight trains are required to do switching at the end of their shift if they have time remaining, right? I remember reading that in an article somewhere about the E. Hunter Harrison-led railways. Someone with more knowledge can clarify or correct me if I'm off base.

This shot below might be one of favourite shots of the year. I tried to get the flags and the station in the frame along with the train. The shadows were harsh, even after some colour correction, but I still think this is a really cool shot.

Here's a close up of the train as it continued to back up into the yard. The heat lines show you that it was quite a warm afternoon when I took this shot. You can also see the exhaust from the engines obscuring the light standard behind the train. My nephew was pretty happy to see this action. My girls were somewhat interested, since they don't see trains very often. After a few minutes, I turned the car toward home and left, thankful to have a brief glimpse of this consist.

There were a number of interesting things at the roundhouse, which is somewhat visible from the station parking lot and I got a few decent shots, but I think I will save them for a future random post. I actually have a fair number of random shots from readers that I think I will package into a few random posts. Stay tuned for those. There are some pretty cool shots to share, including a train full of windmill blades.

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.

FAQ Focus: The (no-so) curious case of CP Hobson

This is the first in an ongoing series that focuses on questions I sometimes come across in the comments section of the blog. The first question goes back to October 2016. A fellow railfan from Sarnia reminded me that I intended to tackle the question below from that fall post.

Q: What's the significance behind the CN Hobson sign near the eastern portal of the Paul M. Tellier Tunnel?

In October 2016, I was in Sarnia to visit family for Thanksgiving when I stopped by the Sarnia Via Rail station to catch some trains. I caught this westbound train heading toward the tunnel. As I did, I noticed that there was a curiously named control point sign west of where I stood on the station platform. For the most part, most of the control point signs I have seen have fallen into the category of geographic name or historical marker.

In the case of this sign, Hobson, the control point is a little bit of both. But it wasn't as straightforward as I thought it would be to find out why CN predecessor Grand Trunk named this CP Hobson.

Here's a closer look at the sign, blown up from the photo above.

In and around Sarnia yard, there are a few control point signs that you can see from public property. There's CP McGregor, which is named after McGregor Side Road, which I assume once crossed the yard. There's CP Blackwell, named after two nearby roads, Blackwell Road and Blackwell Side Road, which intersected at the site of old Blackwell station. The name Blackwell owes itself to Thomas Blackwell, onetime president of the Grand Trunk Railway, which operated the Strathroy Subdivision prior to its absorption into CN. You can read more about this CP here.

Okay, so you get the idea. Usually, a railway will name points along its lines for nearby geography or to pay tribute to its history.

CP Hobson is not named after any neighbourhood or road of the same name in Sarnia. I checked for any Hobson Road and found none. However, when I did a search on Hobson and Street, I found a reference to Joseph Hobson in a report on Sarnia's history.

Hobson, it turns out, was the engineer and architect who designed the St. Clair Tunnel beneath the St. Clair River. He was assigned the task by the Grand Trunk Railway in 1886. The tunnel was opened in 1891 and was considered an engineering marvel at the time, being the longest international underwater rail tunnel in the world at the time. Hobson went on to serve the railway as its chief architect.

I found a few articles about Hobson, but I found the best synopsis of his career was in his Wikipedia profile.

Here's another lesson I learned from this mystery. Always take pictures of the mundane because you never know when they will come in handy. Case in point. Here's a piece of the original bore that was used to drive the tunnel beneath the river. I snapped a photo of this monument as I was waiting for trains on the station platform.

I guess I should have paid some attention to the writing on this plaque when I was organizing my Sarnia photos in my trains images files.

It turns out that Mr. Hobson, in addition to having a control point named after him, also has a small monument devoted to him by the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering.

So, my guess is that milepost 59.2 CP Hobson was probably so named by the Grand Trunk and the name obviously was retained when the line became a CN line.

So CP Hobson is both a tribute to the man who designed the tunnel and likely also named for its close proximity to the old tunnel, which is just a short ride west of the sign.

If you ever have a question when you are reading any of these blog entries, be sure to let me know. I'm glad someone reminded me of this little piece of trivia. Sorry for the delay, but better late than never, I hope!

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.

More relics on the rails

My travels to southern Ontario this summer resulted in some interesting sites trackside, including a few run-ins with railroading history. It's always a good day when you capture a piece of the past, especially when these relics are becoming rare. I managed to snag a few notable relics. You can read my first entry about relics in this post.

The first relic I shot was located at the end of the line on CSX's Sarnia Subdivision, along the shores of the St. Clair River. This antique maintenance-of-way crane car was quite far from the parking lot where I was standing. There was no way to legally get close to the car, so I had to rely on my camera's zoom to get what I could. But the lighting was good and the view was mostly clear, minus a hydro pole.

As you can see, the zoom was stretched to its limits, judging by the look of the tracks leading up to the old car. This old Burro crane is still clad in Chessie yellow. I have seen this car tucked away here a few times, but this was the first time I had a fairly clean view of the car. You can see the St. Clair River in the background and Michigan on the other side. This car is pretty close to where the old CSX rail ferry was located. This ferry service ended right around the same time the CN ferry stopped its operations. What's interesting about the old CSX ferry is that I didn't even know it existed until recent years.

Later on the same day (August 18th), I made my way to CN's Sarnia Yard and was able to catch the CN/CSX interchange as a string of cars was being delivered for pickup by two CSX GP38s in the yard. This train contained the second relic. Below is a long shot of the interchange making its way into the yard. Can you see the relic? It may not be obvious.

Here's a closer look. It's an old Family Lines System hopper car, still fully clad in its original livery. It may not be all that significant to some, but for someone like me interested in the convoluted history of CSX, it's an interesting holdover from the merger era. You can see a second hopper with the same paint, although it has been re-lettered for CSX.

You can see the Louisville & Nashville lettering on the hopper and the all-encompassing logo to the right. Here's a closer look at the logo, below.

Family Lines System was one of the precursors to CSX. It is important to note that the system was itself not an actual railroad, but a common marketing scheme adopted by a number of allied railways, including the Seaboard Coast Line, Louisville & Nashville, the Clinchfield Railroad, the Georgia Railroad, the Atlanta & West Point Railroad and the Western Railway of Alabama (these lines were known as the West Point Route). You can see that all the railroads are represented in the logo. This entity was created in 1972 and lasted until 1982, when the Seaboard System was created. The Seaboard System itself lasted until 1986, when Seaboard and Chessie System were combined to form CSX. That's the simplest explanation. Technically, Chessie was brought into the CSX umbrella in 1987. I'm not sure I understand the specifics of how CSX, as we know it, came to be in 1986-87.

This next shot below isn't necessarily a relic, but more of an rarity or oddity. This is a manifest freight heading west toward the St. Clair River rail tunnel (I will have more to share about this train in another post). The middle unit pulling this train is CN 5550, an SD60F cowl unit. I only ever snagged one other cowl unit in my exploits around this yard. You can read about the other cowl unit I saw, a Bombardier HR616, here. This unit looks massive, with six axles and six safety stripes.

The final relic I found along the CN Strathroy Subdivision in Wyoming. Whenever I visit this area, I visit the tiny Via Rail station and wait for a passing freight train. I didn't end up catching a train but I did find this old loading ramp in the weeds. It appears that this ramp has not been used in some time. Still, it's interesting that pieces of the old track leading to this ramp still remain. You can see the main line to the left of the photo.

I was quite happy with some of these catches over the summer. As I mentioned already, anytime you can shoot some history, it's a good day.

Thanks for reaching out

I posted my email in a previous post and was happy with the messages I received from readers. I was happy to know that I have a good following from various points in Ontario and around Canada. Please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you may have at hammond.michael77 AT gmail.com. One reader has reached out and will be featured as a guest blogger in the near future. He has already showed me some of his material and I am excited about sharing his photos and experiences. Stay tuned!

A rare site: Bombardier HR616

The Summer of 1992 was a prolific time. Looking through my older prints, I noticed quite a number of interesting shots from that summer that are among my better catches. It was a good time for train watching in Sarnia, since the new St. Clair Tunnel had yet to be realized, meaning a number of trains and engines idled in Sarnia Yard. This was due to the bottleneck of oversized rail cars in the yard that had to be ferried across the river and the limitations of the old St. Clair Tunnel.

During summer, I made sure to check out the parked CN units outside the old roundhouse on the western edge of the yard. During my visits to this area, I took lots of photos of a variety of CN units, some with the CN North America scheme, some with the old safety scheme, some on their last legs and others that were shiny and new.

Then there's the unit below.

I came across this photo recently and uploaded it to my computer, almost as an afterthought. I initially didn't like the shot, since it was taken on the shady side of the unit. The print required a great deal of touching up, just to get it looking like this. I forgot about the print until a little while ago when I started searching for information on this odd-looking unit. It turns out, I had a picture of a rare bird.

CN 2105 was a locomotive of particularly rare vintage. It turns out, this was a Bombardier HR616 unit (six axles, 16 cylinders, 3,000 horsepower). Finding information on this cowl unit was tough, since its number now belongs to a C40-8W. To makes things tougher, I had no idea this was a Bombardier unit. I assumed it was an EMD model.

After some research, I discovered that 20 of these units were built for CN at Montreal Locomotive Works in 1982, a few of them leased to the Canadian Pacific and renumbered in 1983, before being returned. Some refer to these units as MLW HR616s, due to where they were built.

Sadly, these units were terribly unreliable, even though the HR was supposed to stand for "Highly Reliable." This must sound like a familiar story to those familiar with Bombardier's other big foray into heavy rail locomotives around this time, the LRC locomotive. The shape of this CN locomotive reminds me of the "red barn" SD40-2Fs that CP rostered. For a comparison, here's a shot of one of those units taken by Steve Boyko in his blog, Confessions of a Train Geek.

This CN unit, 2105, was the first to be retired, after it was damaged in an wreck in 1993 in London, according to Wikipedia. Here's a shot of the unit when it was newly delivered to CN. You may notice how this unit has black paint around its front windows, which is a slight deviation from the CN paint scheme. Also, in this picture, you will notice that the ditch lights had been added to the front of the unit.

You will also notice an old Alco hitched up to 2105, to the right. I should have grabbed a shot of that one, but I guess I didn't.

But the shot of this cowl unit, a throwaway print by most measures, turned out to be a gem. Glad I hung onto it.

 

 

CN's Point Edward Spur today

CN's Point Edward spur is a fascinating little run of trackage for a number of reasons, as I pointed out in a previous post. Last year, when visiting family in the Sarnia area, I made sure to make time to take shots of the busy railway activities in Sarnia. One of the lines I love to shoot is the Point Edward spur, because it's such an anomaly, unguarded as it is in the middle of a downtown, running through parkland and along the St. Clair River's shoreline. I noticed recently that I had amassed a few shots of the spur at different points, which offered an interesting snapshot of this legacy line.

The spur begins at the westernmost end of the CN Sarnia Yard, across from a wye junction at the Lambton Diesel Services Roundhouse and a nearby CN Police and maintenance building. This is the point where all the trackage in the yard contracts back into one main line heading for the Paul Tellier tunnel. (If you are shooting near the roundhouse, be careful and stay on public property! I did.). The shot below was taken Oct. 13, 2013 of two GP9RMs, which were parked on the beginning of the St. Clair River Industrial spur. I have seen numerous shots of this pair on the Point Edward spur, so I'm guessing they were serving both spurs. In my previous post (see link above), I pointed out that the Point Edward line was served almost exclusively by SW1200s.

From its starting point, the Point Edward spur heads due west, paralleling the main line to the Paul Tellier Tunnel beneath the St. Clair River, albeit at a higher elevation.

But, as you can just make out in this 1993 shot, the spur, which is upper left, winds away from the tunnel trackage beneath the Donohue Bridge and makes its way through the edge of Sarnia, where south-end homes meet the edge of the Chemical Valley refineries. The line passes through the edge of the Imperial Oil refinery, where a few smaller spurs serve the refinery and connect to the CSX Sarnia Subdivision along the river. The Point Edward line then heads north along the river shoreline, past where the old St. Clair rail ferry yard used to be, toward Sarnia's riverfront parks and Point Edward. At one point, the line passes in front of a lawyer's office and through Alexander Mackenzie Park. The level crossings in the downtown, amazingly, are only marked with crossbucks, due to the scarce traffic on the line.

The Point Edward line parallels Sarnia's Front Street, crossing it twice at angle crossings, before it passes through Centennial Park. Along the way, the line makes its way past Canadian National U-1-f 4-8-2 Mountain-type steam locomotive 6069, known as Bullet Nose Betty. This locomotive is now undergoing a much-needed restoration after spending decades in the elements. The spur can be seen bottom left. At a point just before this one, the line branched off along Front Street and headed to the village of Point Edward. From there, it served the former Holmes Foundry and made its way to an old rail yard near the Bluewater Bridge. That old yard and freight shed is now home to a casino. The old line was used for car storage as recently as the 1990s but that section was scrapped.

So, even though it comes close to its namesake village, the Point Edward spur ends here, at the Cargill Grain Elevators on Sarnia Bay. The elevators take in grain and oilseed from Great Lakes freighters and load them onto rail cars. You can just make out the hoppers in the shot below, which was taken from Harbour Road. This shot gives you an idea of the size of this facility.

A closer view through the links in the fence shows more clearly that the elevators are a busy place year round. These shots were taken Dec. 23, 2013.

The grain elevator is in an interesting part of Sarnia Bay, near the government docks where Great Lakes freighters seek refuge in the winter for repairs. This shot below was taken several years ago, from the parking lot of a nearby restaurant. It's quite the site to get out of your car and pull up next to one of these behemoths. They are part of the old Algoma Central empire, which once included the railway of the same name, now CN property.

 

So this is the status of this spur today: the ferry is gone, its adjoining riverfront rail yard history, the extension into Point Edward a distant memory and the Holmes Foundry that the spur served a vacant lot. Yet this spur continues to operate, with the Cargill elevator still making use of rail service regularly. When you are lucky enough to catch trains on the line, the spur makes for some spectacular photography.