Railfan Stories

One recent evening, I went to the St. Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg for an MRI. I have some neck pain and numbness, and my doctor ordered the MRI to see what’s going on. I was on “standby”, meaning they would fit me in between patients sometime between 5:45 PM and 9 PM. I was guaranteed … Read more

Fall in love when we meet againWe can finish what we startedFall in love if we try againAnd then nothing will keep us apart– Alanis [Morrissette], “When We Meet Again” One evening, I had a little bit of time to railfan before doing some chores. I thought I’d try the CP Emerson sub to see … Read more

Well, COVID-19. What a thing. Years from now, I hope we’re all able to look back on this and shake our heads at just how life-changing this was. One of the big phrases of the year is “social distancing”. This is the act of keeping a distance from everyone else, something I happen to be … Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had the good fortune of seeing one of the Central Manitoba Railway’s GMD1 locomotives for the first time. Cando Contracting acquired three GMD1 locomotives from CN – CN 1401, 1434 and 1435. Two of those locomotives were rebuilt and are now in service, and CN 1434 has been used for parts. CCGX 1009 CN … Read more