Two Hours in Regina

We had a family trip to Regina recently to celebrate the 50th wedding anniversary of my wife’s aunt and uncle. I gladly spent the time with family and friends, but I woke up early on Sunday to do a tiny bit of railfanning.

There was a derailment in CPKC’s rail yard downtown on August 1 – looks like one train sideswiped another one – so I thought I’d see how the cleanup was going.

The yard is not particularly accessible for railfans and I couldn’t see a lot. I did see a couple of track panel cars bringing new track, but the scene was largely cleaned up.

I spotted a local train heading west, so I followed it and caught it near Mosaic Stadium, home of the Saskatchewan Roughriders.

CP 4426 and 2271 were pushing two tank cars (PROX 39253 and 92842) and pulling a string of covered hoppers. The conductor was riding the point – on PROX 39253 – probably quite thankful that it was a lovely morning without any rain or significant wind.

Just as the last hopper passed me, CP 7431 went roaring west on the adjacent track, long hood first. I missed catching that one!

The local train pushed out to Pinkie Road, just west of Regina, and halted by the Brandt facility. In case you’re wondering, Brandt’s locomotive BRTX 2009 is still there (see below).

CP 7431 was there, coupling up to a container train standing on the main line. My guess is that train had been parked there since the derailment, waiting for the line to clear.

The local train was waiting to use the crossover track in the foreground to access Southsask Quality Processors and drop their hoppers off.

Eventually the container train got underway.

It took several minutes to cross Pinkie Road. Here’s the video:

The local train sat there, so I wandered around a bit.

When I came back, the local had set off the hopper cars and was on the main line in the distance, beyond the highway overpass.

The switches are lined for the main line, and I imagine it was going to set off the two cars somewhere in the Global Transportation Hub in the area.

It was nice to do a little railfanning around Regina again!

More About the Brandt Locomotive

This is from a March 2010 blog post:

I saw an interesting sight at the CEMR shops in Winnipeg yesterday. Brandt prototype genset locomotive BRTX 2009 was parked behind the shops. I had heard of this locomotive but I had no idea it was in Winnipeg.

The loco has three John Deere 6135H (600 HP each), and you can see the three exhaust stacks on the very long hood of this locomotive. The idea of a genset locomotive is that instead of a single prime mover (engine), multiple smaller engines can be brought on or offline as required to save fuel.

This locomotive is built on an entirely new frame. It was expected that Brandt would use the frame of ex-CP GP9 1592 that they purchased, but that apparently did not happen.

There is a lot of detail on this locomotive at Green Rail News.

Apparently the unit was not successful. It has been sitting at the Brandt facility for years, and this is what it looked like on August 2.