Dark Times With Caleb

Late last summer, my good friend Caleb Wentzell was in Winnipeg for a while, doing some training with CN. I picked him up one evening for a different kind of train-ing… watching trains! We decided to head down the Sprague subdivision to see if we could find a train while there was still some light … Read more

CN, then CP, then CN

I wanted to be clever and title this post “A CN-CP-CN Sandwich”, but you’ll see that it would have made a lopsided sandwich at best. So we’re stuck with this lame title. Anyway. The trains are the important part, not the blog post title – right? Right. Whither the Maroon This was another excursion to … Read more

“By The Book” – Railfan Edition

I am shamelessly stealing this idea from J D Lowe at the excellent 30 Squares of Ontario blog. He wrote his “Miniature Buildings Edition” post based on a post by Michael Leddy on the Orange Crate Art blog, which riffs off the New York Times’ “By The Book” game. I guess there’s a lot of … Read more

VIA 2 On The Move?

VIA Rail’s service across Canada was brought to a standstill due to the railway blockades in support of the Wet’suwet’en pipeline protest. The blockades started on February 6 in response to an RCMP attempt to enforce a court injunction. The blockades popped up in numerous locations across the country. This forced the cancellation of numerous … Read more

The Waiting

The waiting is the hardest partEvery day you see one more trainYou shoot it on film, you take it black and whiteThe waiting is the hardest part“The Waiting”, Tom Petty, more or less It was a bitterly cold afternoon when I went out to photograph along the CN main line on February 15th (2020). IC … Read more

Ontario Northland in New Brunswick

There have been a few occasions when an Ontario Northland Railway locomotive has wandered into New Brunswick. I think they may have been repaying “horsepower hours” to CN and I was fortunate to see two of these locomotives in the 10 years I was railfanning in New Brunswick. ONR 2105 ONR 2105 visited the Maritimes … Read more

Book Review: The Ontario Northland Railway

Ontario Northland Railway Cover

The book “The Ontario Northland Railway” by Patrick C. Dorin is an excellent snapshot of the ONR in the mid 1980s. Written by the prolific Dr. Dorin, this book is an affectionate look at the railway that runs from Toronto to Moosonee. The book is divided into four major sections: History of the ONR and … Read more

Snow Time

I was out in the morning of February 8th, 2020 looking for some CP heritage units, as is my wont these days. It was a bit of a blustery, snowy morning, a morning good for train photography. The Rivers On my way north, I found an eastbound train stopped short of mile 15 on the … Read more

Electric Buses in Winnipeg – The 2000s

In early 2011 a prototype electric bus project was launched to run a single electric bus in Winnipeg. The project was financed by the province, Manitoba Hydro and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI). At the time, MHI was in the business of manufacturing lithium-ion batteries but exited that business in 2014. The study was conducted in … Read more

Chasing the Maroon

CP 7016 in Niverville, Manitoba

I caught my second* CP heritage unit on February 11th – and my first “on the road” – thanks to some Facebook tips in the great RailsMBSK railfan group. (I posted about my first heritage unit sighting – CP 7013 – as one of my Railfan Five) Tim B posted that he saw CP 7016 … Read more