A Good Time, Not A Long Time

I went out for a little late evening / sunset photography on April 20th, hoping to get a chance to fly my drone and get some overhead shots. It didn’t work out exactly as I hoped, but I ended up being pretty satisfied with the photos I did get.

As I approached the south / east end of Symington Yard here in Winnipeg, I saw a train waiting to enter the yard. CN 2340 was on the head end of a string of loaded autorack cars. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a pure autorack train on CN; it’s always interesting to see a “unit” train like this.

After taking a few photos from the crossing, I carried on east along the CN Sprague subdivision, hoping to find a train to fly my drone near. As I drove along the Trans-Canada Highway, I spotted another train, a mile or two behind CN 2340. It didn’t look like it was moving, so I took the crossing west of it and drove up beside it. As I arrived, I saw it was moving, but slowly…

This train had an interesting mix of locomotives on the head end. BNSF 7955 was the lead locomotive, followed by “15 year” anniversary CN 2128, CN 2955, and former demonstrator SD70ACe CN 8102. The conductor gave me a nice wave as they crept by.

They came to a stop, clearly pulling the train along enough to avoid blocking the crossing behind them. I used that crossing to get back on the highway, heading east toward Lorette siding.

As I was driving along the train, I stopped a couple of times to photograph cars that I really liked. The next car was the most interesting car on the train, in my opinion.

Gotta love that faded Santa Fe logo and the “Super Shock Control”.

I carried on to Lorette siding but there were no other trains to be seen. I did fly my drone there, for fun and for practice. It’s often windy there but it was nice and still this evening.

After flying, I drove to Dufresne to see if there was a train in the siding there, but nothing was in sight. It was starting to get dark, so I drove back to Winnipeg, noting that all of the trains had gone into Winnipeg and the east-facing signals were showing green. That meant a train was leaving Winnipeg…

Shiny new CN 3159 led leaser CEFX 1016 and a long mixed train.

They had a green signal and a CN truck waiting to do the rollby inspection. I liked how the signals were reflecting off the side of the locomotives and the water in the ditch.

I was shooting at ISO 1600 and 1/15 second exposure. There’s a little grain but mostly because I boosted the exposure in post processing.

A few long exposure shots at the crossing completed the evening, and I went home, satisfied.