Ottawa's Train Hotspot: Belfast Road Overpass

Ottawa's central train station hosts a number of Via passenger trains each day, connecting to Toronto and Montreal. I've been by the station a few times in the past weeks on lunch breaks and weekends, to get some shots of new Renaissance coach consists as well as the familiar LRC consists. The other day, I ventured just east of the station to the Belfast Road overpass to get some long shots of the station's platforms and some elevated shots of outbound Montreal trains. The vantage point is tricky, as there are a number of hydro wires to contend with, along with a fair bit of overgrown brush. However, the overpass offers what might be the city's best best rail-watching vantage point.

The image below is a shot of Montreal-bound Train 54, led by rebuilt F40PH-2 6421 with four LRC coaches in tow. Another train, with P42 909 and Renaissance coaches, sits idle, awaiting its assignment on the next track. I was initially disappointed when I arrived at the station, thinking that the P42 consist would be the train I shot heading east. Thankfully, it wasn't (I'm a traditionalist, what can I say? I don't like the look of the P42s).

When the train approached the overpass, the wires were less of  an issue. I have rarely had the chance to see a train from this vantage point, other than in Toronto near Union Station. I was pretty happy with these shots below. As you can see, there are fewer wires in the shot below. If you look in the cab of the locomotive, you might see something. Do you see it?

Here's a closer look below.

Someone's enjoying a coffee on the right.

Before I headed up to the overpass, I was taking some shots of the idled train with the Renaissance coaches when the coach behind the locomotive caught my eye. I haven't seen this before.

This is Renaissance baggage car 7002, one of only nine in the Via fleet, according to its website. I had to look at it a few times before I realized what it was. It certainly doesn't fit with the image I have of Via baggage cars from its streamliner fleet or its old blue and yellow fleet inherited from CN. I expected to see a giant baggage door but it looks more like a retrofitted passenger car to me. The Via website says these cars were made from the shells of sleeping cars.

While I'm at it, here is a shot of another interesting coach worth noting. I caught this car a few weeks ago on Train 50. It's the new paint scheme for the LRC cars. This swoop indicates that the car is a Business Class car (formerly Via 1).

Beachburg Subdivision Update: I have been asked by a few readers what is happening with the old CN Beachburg subdivision, which is this blog's namesake. At this point, all I can share is that there have been no new reports of the CN rail removal teams coming to Ottawa. In my part of the city, the hopper cars that had been stored near my neighbourhood for months were recently taken away. I first blogged about this in May. I'm not sure if this means anything, since there have been no new reports of rail being removed from the portion of the Beachburg Sub that falls within the Ottawa city limits. I am trying to find out what is happening from a few sources. I will post an update soon.

Cabooses on the CSX Sarnia Sub

CSX Transportation's Sarnia Subdivision was a fascinating anomaly in the 1990s for a number of reasons, including its continuing use of Chessie System painted GP38s well past the creation of CSX. This sub also hosted a B&O painted GP38 for a few years in the early 1990s and had no signalling equipment for much of its Chatham-Sarnia line. Another strange quirk that characterized this line was the use of Chessie System-painted cabooses into the early to mid 1990s, including a bay-window caboose.

Of course, a number of  railways continued to use cabooses into the early 1990s, so I am not suggesting that this sub was the last surviving rail line to use these cars. However, I am guessing that it was among one of the last lines to use them. In the area where I watched trains, CN had long since stopped using its trademark red cabooses by the early 1990s in and around Sarnia, including its branch line that passed by Corunna's eastern town limits.

The most commonly used type of crew car on the CSX Sarnia line was top-mounted cupola style car like C&O 103144. I likely snapped this photo in the summer of 1992, although this photo was not dated. I missed the head-end of this train, but I arrived in time to catch a few interesting cars and this caboose. You will notice that it's hitched to an autorack, which was a common site on this subdivision up until the mid-1990s when this traffic began to disappear. I mention this because it makes the cupola on the caboose useless when you can't see anything beyond the next car in the consist. However, by the 1990s, the cupola was obviously not a key component of this car.

I did a little research online to see whatever happened to this car and found nothing. Unfortunately, Chessie's history is hard to track online, especially when it comes to this forgotten subdivision. 

The above photo was taken in a new subdivision, which gave me a new vantage point to watch trains on this line. Before this subdivision was built, the area was forest near the edge of town.

The photo below was taken in the spring of 1991 at the St. Clair Boulevard grade crossing on the outer southern edge of the town. This bay window crew car is, to my knowledge, still on this sub and in Port Huron, Michigan as a shoving car or safety cab, depending on what term you prefer. You can see what the car looks like now in this photo from RailPictures.net. I prefer to remember it as it was back in the spring of '91, when it was still in use as a crew car. What a beauty!

This was the shot I took as it approached the crossing at the tail end of a manifest freight. The bay window car is hitched to an ex-Louisville & Nashville hi-cube box car, which likely carried auto parts. This was another common site on this line in the 1990s until this traffic largely dried up. 

I am looking forward to visiting family in the Sarnia area later this summer. I am hoping to catch a train on the sub, although I doubt I'll see the variety that I saw back in the day.

End of the line for CP Ellwood Sub

Looking back on my first few posts in this blog, I realize that I have devoted a great deal of time to Ottawa's railway history. I don't mean to come across as someone who bemoans the fact that Ottawa has very little rails left. I have mentioned the decision to lift all rails from central Ottawa in the 1960s a number of times. I think this was probably a good decision, for the most part, since Ottawa really doesn't have the resource economy and heavy industry that require rail. The old rail yards along the Rideau Canal and the west end of the Lebreton Flats really make very little sense today, especially in an area that is supposed to be a showcase of the nation.

However, I do think that pulling every last rail up in central Ottawa and neglecting what little was left outside the core is a huge mistake. Case in point: the old Ottawa West train yard on the former Canadian Pacific Ellwood subdivision. This might be the biggest missed opportunity, due to its proximity to the end of the O-Train line and its future potential as a commuter link across the Ottawa River to Quebec. This old yard, where some minimal trackage remains, has literally gone to seed. I found this old piece of track signalling equipment among the weeds last week. It's one of a few relics that have been left to rust in the weeds.

The gravel road to the left is an old right-of-way, long since torn up. To the right of this switch, buried in overgrown plants, trees and weeds, is a rusted right-of-way that leads to the Prince of Wales railway trestle across the Ottawa River (see photos below). This rail line branches off the end of the Capital Railway O-Train line, which runs north-south from Bayview Station, west of the downtown, to Greenboro Station, in suburban Ottawa's south end.

There has been talk about extending the light-rail line across the river to old Hull, now part of Gatineau, but the condition of the trestle would place severe speed limitations on any trains travelling across. As you will see below, the old bridge, now city owned, is in terrible shape. It has not seen a train in some time. I believe one the last trains to use the bridge was a ballast train that helped upgrade the road bed of the O-Train line. You can see that photo on Colin Churcher's excellent Railways In Canada site here. The last CP freight in Ottawa operated in 1997, and this portion of the Ellwood Sub was sold to the city shortly afterward.

Amazingly, as the city has been busily preparing for an east-west LRT rail line, there has been no discussion about keeping this valuable right-of-way in operating condition for future use. A group calling itself Mobility Ottawa Outaouais Systems and Enterprises (mOOse) has been lobbying government to try and get the city to maintain this piece of infrastructure, much as it would a deteriorating road. So far, there has been no effort to do anything other than let the rails rust.

 

Even the script is coming apart atop the bridge!

The Ottawa West railyard was once a bustling hive of activity, with a rail station for CPR's trancontinental passenger trains, a locomotive roundhouse and various other facilities, most of which were torn down decades ago. In many respects, this was probably a good thing since the CPR's cross-Canada trackage no longer runs through the Ottawa region, making the yard redundant, especially considering how close it was to residential areas in Hintonburg and Mechanicsville, to the imediate west.

Here's a great shot of the old Ottawa West station. This site is now a parking lot next to an overpass. It was taken in 1965 by Bill Linley and is also found on the Railways In Canada website.

I was told by a rail historian recently  that this station was only used for transcontinental trains, like The Dominion, pictured left. CP used the downtown Union Station for all of its corridor passenger trains until it closed in 1966.

I should point out that, if you live in Ottawa and want to wander around this old yard, you can, since a bike path does cut right through it. However, the remaining right-of-way itself is city owned land and I don't think they would be too keen to know I was walking along the neglected tracks. I pass this area every morning on my bus ride to work and I was curious about what was actually left of this former rail hub. Here are a few more relics I found in my little jaunt.

The picture below is another old piece of signalling equipment that has been left behind. This one is right below the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway (formerly the Ottawa River Parkway).
 

This, left, was Milepost Five, apparently. I was glad I checked out the area when I did. The birds seemed to be a little annoyed that I was encroaching on their little haven, especially a few that were nesting on the ground around the old tracks. In the coming months, work is going to begin on building a new Bayview O-Train/bus station, which will connect the end of the Capital Railway O-Train line with the overpass, where express buses travel to and from the downtown. What this means for the old CPR right-of-way across the river and bridge is not clear. I doubt anything will be done, other than a cursory clean-up at some point. However, if the city is indeed serious about building a light rail system, this key piece of infrastructure will need to be rehabilitated before it becomes too expensive to salvage. That's why I call this neglect on the city's part a huge missed opportunity. If the city had maintained even small pieces of its rail network, including this vital component at Ottawa West, it wouldn't be facing a multibillion-dollar bill to rebuild a rail network what was already in place.