Guest Photos: Freight Train meets Via on the Alexandria Sub

A good friend of the blog, Keith Boardman, has really been my eyes and ears in the east end of Ottawa. To be honest, those who are looking to capture some rare CN freight trains in Ottawa are much better off focusing on the Alexandria Subdivision rather than the weekly run up to Arnprior. Sadly, since I work from home and do not have the time to go out into the east end much, I don't have many photographs of anything beyond Belfast Road. That's where Keith has come in over the years with news, photos and tips from the east end. 

Keith has come through in a big way many times. He recently shared an interesting collection of photographs from the east end when a CN freight train returning from Coteau met a Via corridor train on the Alexandria Subdivision.

This is my favourite shot, below, of CN's freight returning from picking up cars at Coteau. It is waiting on the siding for a Via Rail passenger train. As the Alexandria Sub is Via's trackage, this is one of the few places in Canada where passenger trains get the priority of movement. You can see the signal lights, the plows up sign to the left and the ditch lights of the CN geep. Lots of cool elements in this picture, not counting the snow and the outline of the rails amid the white.

And here's the reason the freight was waiting in the hole. A speeding Via Rail corridor train with a F40PH-2 in the lead is heading east and kicking up some snow as its speeds past.

After the corridor train is past, the freight gets the all-clear signal. The next shot Keith took that I really like was this shot, below, which gives you a rare glimpse of a freight train in the Ottawa area that has more than three tank cars, like the weekly Arnprior Turn. It's a going away shot, but the different colours of the box cars are the stars of this image, in my opinion. The NS boxcar is almost completely covered in graffiti. You can also see a TTX Railbox car and a mysterious white boxcar, which does not appear to have any clear markings. Also not sure about the light blue boxcar in the left of the shot

Keith also sent me pictures of another meet he caught. I shared them earlier this year but thought I'd share them again with the fulls story from Keith. Here is what he told me about this meet:

From Keith's Dec. 2021 email:

I was passing through Carlsbad Springs at 8:28 this morning and the signals came on as I was about to cross Piperville Road. I know there's a westbound Via that goes through around 8:05 give or take, but didn't think it would be running that late. A Railterm truck was parked on the side near the crossing and a worker was out of it, so I assumed he was testing the crossing equipment. 

It seemed he wasn't, so I looked down the track towards the siding,and I could see a light, with ditch lights coming through the fog. Turned out it was the blue and white leased unit (now a CN unit), with a second power unit in tow. I couldn't get a very good pic as the Railterm truck was immediately to the left of my view of the approaching consist. 

I like Keith's spirit. Despite the visual obstruction with the Railterm crew trackside, he managed a few shots of the Coteau train. Here's one more shot he was able to improvise.

I have some other shots Keith took, including a few he captured of the Arnprior Turn in the west end. Keith clearly gets out more than I do. 

I will leave these other images for future posts, which I intend to share in the coming weeks. I might increase my frequency of posts to every 10 days, as I have a massive backlog of topics to cover, not to mention a year-end post with some highlights. 

Stay tuned for two very hard-won shots of some antique freight cars I saw in Ogdensburg, New York. Also, I have shots from Kingston from Novemeber, which I intend to break into two posts. I have two posts worth of shots from Waterloo, Ontario, from a summer trip I took there. I also have a few shots from a summer trip to Gananoque, Ontario. It's been a relatively fruitful year for this blog, although my biweekly pace has helped me considerably. 

My thanks to Keith for these shots and the ones I have yet to share. Stay tuned for more from Keith.

More from Walkley Yard

This past weekend, I took a quick trip to Walkley Yard and managed to catch the CN crew assembling its local. The trip ended up being a good chance for me to tie up some loose ends and address some issues brought up by my readers. You can see the local below, being pulled by GP38-2W 4800 with the conductor walking alongside the consist early morning Sunday, September 8th. A couple of points to mention. The first is the RailBox boxcar to the left of the local with the original paint scheme. The second is that the geep is in the safety scheme. I'm amazed that whichever locomotive is assigned to Walkley is usually in this scheme.

As the local crawled toward my vantage point, I managed to catch one of CN's two cabooses in service in Ottawa, this one trailing directly behind the geep. The caboose, numbered 79834, is a curiosity for a number of reasons. The most obvious point is its truly awful paint job. The second point is the word "MILLENNIUM" stenciled on the right side. Doing a little research, I found out that this car was built in 1976 and was a CN caboose originally. It became part of the Ontario L'Orignal Railway (OLOR) in 1996. The car, numbered OLOR 2000, became part of the Ottawa Central when the OCR's parent company bought the OLOR in 2000. When the OCR was purchased by CN in 2008, the caboose reverted back to its original CN 79834 numbers. The paint job was obviously not a priority. Here's a shot of the car in its OLOR days. The CN has one other caboose in use in the city, which you can see here.

In a recent post, I took some shots of an old RDC and old CN caboose that were parked on a wreck track. I was asked about the car that was hitched to the RDC. I made sure to go back and take a proper shot of the car. As suggested, it appears to be a steel coil car. I'm not sure what it was doing attached to the RDC and the former CN caboose.  

Finally, I submit for your approval, a CSX waffle-side boxcar. This time, I am reasonably sure that I am correct in identifying this as a waffle side car, given that it has vertical slats and horizontal notches. There was a string of cars like this in the yard on the weekend. Can you see the hasty plywood repair made to the car? Seeing a few CSX cars in the yard made me nostalgic for the old CSX Sarnia Subdivision. I have to get back there and get some new shots on that line.

This weekend in Ottawa, folk legend Gordon Lightfoot will play a set to close out the Ottawa Folk Festival. I have bought a ticket since I grew up listening to Lightfoot's music. I look forward to hearing the Canadian Railroad Trilogy live. Should be fun!

Ottawa's Walkley Rail Yard

Ottawa's Walkley Yard is a strange place these days, with only a bare minimum of activity happening. Since CN's acquisition of the Ottawa Central Railway in 2008, there has been a noticeable drop off in freight traffic in the region. With the O-Train service suspended for the summer, due to the $59-million renewal of the existing 8-kilometre Capital Railway, the commuter trains also sit silent in the mostly empty yard. I dropped by on the civic holiday Monday (Colonel By Day in Ottawa) just to see what was there, and the trip did not disappoint. When I drove to the end of Albion Road, where the CN office sits, I saw this former Devco Railway caboose, sitting near the locomotive shop, badly in need of a paint job. As you can see, security in the yard is minimal at best, which explains the graffiti on the caboose, including its windows. The caboose has been around since the Ottawa Central days. It is still used by CN for the same purpose, mainly shoving moves.

Just east of the caboose, I saw the lone CN locomotive currently assigned to Ottawa, GP38-2W 4807, still clad in the CN safety scheme, albeit just barely. Getting photos from a service road was tough since the weeds in the yard have not been trimmed this summer, which tended to obscure the locomotive's trucks. Seeing the old geep in the safety scheme was cool. I have always liked that scheme.

The Walkley Yard was constructed in 1955 by the National Capital Commission to replace the Canadian National's rail operations in central Ottawa. This was part of a plan to rid the centre of the city of its rail lines as part of a Paris-inspired urban redevelopment plan. The yard eventually housed Canadian Pacific's freight operations, which were moved in the 1960s from its old Ottawa West Yard, near the Prince of Wales rail bridge on the Ottawa River. In the past decade and a half, CP sold off its local trackage to the City of Ottawa while the Ottawa Central was sold to CN as part of a larger package of short lines. When you factor in the loss of heavy industry in Eastern Ontario, the end result is a mostly empty rail yard, which describes Walkley these days. These cars below were the sum total of rolling stock in the main yard on the holiday.

But as I drove down the service road, I saw something on the margins of the empty east end of the yard. I drove toward the odd site, but not before I took a few snaps of interesting rolling stock on a spur, which included a transload facility called Rideau Bulk. You can see a Wisconsin Central boxcar to the right of the TTX (Railbox to me) waffle-side boxcar.

A little further east of that spur, I saw these interesting relics at the edge of the yard. Sitting on a dead-end wreck track was former CN caboose 79872 and former Budd RDC numbered 6002. Doing a little research, I learned that both have been left at Walkley since 2007. The cars are lettered DAWX, which means they are owned by David A. Wamsley & Co., a private company that owns and sells rail equipment. I was only able to find a few scant mentions of the company online and a few photos, so I invite readers to share what they can find about this company and these cars. At one point, there was another RDC on the same track, but that unit has since been refurbished by Via. From what I can gather, this remaining RDC is a former piece of Via equipment (numbered 6002) and is a RDC9. Notice that the caboose's door has been left open.


Another view of the RDC, below.

And a view of the end.

 

Here's another shot of the caboose and its markings. There are photos of other CN cabooses out there, but I was unable to find a shot of this one in its prime. 

 

As I left the yard, I saw one lonely ballast car (filled). It looks as if the car has been modified. Behind it, one of the city's water towers.

And one last shot of CN 4807 before I headed back home.

This visit proved to be the highlight of my holiday Monday. Now that I know how to get around the yard a little better, I am going to make a habit of checking it out every once in a while, even if there is only a handful of things to shoot. In Ottawa, you have to take what you can get!

Chasing a ghost from the B&O

As I mentioned previously, I grew up along CSX's Sarnia subdivision between Chatham, Ont. and Sarnia, Ont. The line was a throwback in many ways, which you can read about in this post. The most obvious throwback on the Sarnia sub was the continuing use of Chessie System-painted geeps (mainly GP-38s) well into the 1990s. This seemed odd to me since the merger forming CSX between Chessie System and Seaboard System was quite a speck in the rear-view mirror by the mid 1990s.

This sub was in many respects an orphan, being cut off from the remainder of the CSX network. I've been told this was the reason why the motive power on this sub continued to sport Chessie colours long after most of CSX's diesels were repainted in the initial grey and blue CSX paint scheme.

Well, seeing Chessie painted locomotives is one thing, but seeing a Baltimore & Ohio-painted geep? In the 1990s?

I know it sounds ridiculous, but this was what happened one summer in the early 1990s when this ghost of railroading past made its way onto the Sarnia sub. I remember how strange it seemed to be seeing the dark blue geep puttering up and down the line. The last time I had seen a B&O geep was in the mid-1980s when I was in grade school and even then I knew that the B&O was long gone.

So one summer, I began my quest to catch up with this engine and snap a photo of it. The problem was, being too young to drive, my sole means of catching up to trains was to hop on my bike and race down to the St. Clair Boulevard crossing, which was about five minutes from my house. I remember this engine teasing me. I would see it from time to time when I was being driven around and didn't have a camera. I also remember biking around Corunna (my hometown) and hearing a train coming only to realize I didn't have my camera on me. That B&O geep was an elusive subject to capture.

So one afternoon as I was biking around Corunna near one of our main roads, Hill Street, I could hear the sound of an engine horn. The B&O geep was at the head of the consist, complete with the Capitol Building logo on the front of the hood. As luck would have it, I had my camera. Even more exciting, I just so happened to be in a great spot to capture the engine, very close to the tracks. My moment had finally arrived.

As the train approached, I set up my camera and watched it approach through the camera lens. It crawled closer and closer, finally relenting to a photo, I thought. Just as the unit began to fill my frame, preening for a photo, some kid on a bike raced right into the middle of my frame, right as I clicked the button to snap a frame.

This was long before the term photobomb meant anything. I was crushed. I quickly recovered and took this shot (below).

This going away shot was all I could get after I wound the camera's film and framed the locomotive properly. I didn't date the original print, but I am assuming it was taken around 1991 or 1992.

I remember looking at that ruined photo in my collection for years, always cursing that dumb kid in the middle of the frame, who was scowling at me and wondering what the hell I was doing taking his photo. In disgust, I threw away the print. Years later, I threw away all my reels of film. To this day, I still can't believe how stupid those two decisions were.

So, this is the only shot I ever captured of CSX 2100, still painted in the old B&O colours. At least it makes a good story. Sigh.