Industries with railway sidings often need to move rail cars around. Large industries like refineries, paper mills, and grain elevators often have multiple cars on site at once and may need to move cars in and out of specific locations to load or unload them. Industries often used small industrial locomotives to do this work. … Read more
When we lived in Moscow back in the late 1970s, there wasn’t a lot to do. Russian television was of course broadcast in Russian, which I didn’t understand, and seemed to be mostly state propaganda. I read voraciously from the school library, but for family activities, we were pretty limited in what we could do. … Read more
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here are two slides; 2×1000=2,000. I can still do math!
I was driving around one evening recently, roaming around the east side of Winnipeg looking for trains. I ended up with a few sunset drone photos of the Dugald grain elevator – both the old wooden one and the new Parrish & Heimbecker one under construction just east of the town. But no trains. Dejected, … Read more
This post follows Trains at Night. After driving around all night to see trains, your intrepid railfan ended up near Oakville, MB shortly before sunrise. It was turning out to be a beautiful morning and it was nice to be outside. The birds were back and making their presence known with a variety of songs. … Read more
I really like photographing at night. I enjoy the change in perspective, the challenge of photographing in scant light, the different techniques… I don’t do it enough. On April 3 I decided that I would try to capture the Milky Way.
In the little “about me” section on various web sites and services, I used to write “I like to tell stories”. These days, I usually have something like “I like trains” or “I am a photographer who specializes in trains and grain elevators”, but I still like to tell stories.
The Northern Alberta Railways (NAR) were jointly owned by CN and CP until January 1, 1981, when CN took them over. At that time, the 21 NAR diesel locomotives became CN locomotives and were renumbered over the next couple of months. These are the three types of diesel electric locomotives owned by the Northern Alberta … Read more
This is a review of the new book, “Northern Alberta Railways Diesels: 1952-1980” by Leslie S. Kozma. This is an exhaustively researched, well told book on the short history of diesel locomotives with the Northern Alberta Railways (NAR) between the end of steam and the absorption of the NAR by CN.
I went out one afternoon to the CN main line to see what I could see. It turned out to be a pretty high traffic period, and I saw seven trains in ninety minutes.