steve

I'm a photographer who specializes in trains and grain elevators. I like to tell stories.

Snowshoe Railfanning

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Long freight train rolling across a winter landscape

I’ve been looking for something to do during the winter besides huddling inside waiting for warmer weather. Late last year I asked Santa for a pair of snowshoes and on Christmas morning this HRKING set was under the tree.

A Frosty Morning

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In January we had several mornings where everything was coated in a beautiful and delicate frost. Everyone calls it hoar frost but I understand it was rime ice in most cases. Fog in winter leads to rime ice, usually. However it formed, it was beautiful.

Felix

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Black and white cat staring at the camera

I’ve lost my buddy, Felix. He came into our lives in late November 2019 with his “sister” Millie, and he left us in the morning of February 9, 2023. From the start, he was my boy. I protected him early on when Millie was asserting her alpha cat status, and we developed our own routines. … Read more

Algoma Central Equipment

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Collage of three black and white photographs of Algoma Central Railway equipment

Here are a few scans of black and white negatives I acquired on an online auction site. I don’t know who the photographer(s) were, unfortunately. The auction listings showed two dates – July 27, 1979 for the flatcar and the rules car, and August 3, 1979 for the observation car. Bulkhead flatcar AC 2372 is … Read more

QNS&L Timetable From 1968

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Quebec North Shore & Labrador Railway logo and partial map

Here’s a public timetable for the Quebec, North Shore and Labrador Railway effective October 17, 1968. It was printed on a two-sided piece of stiff cardboard / paper, roughly 8.5″ x 11″, with rounded corners. The cover shows a map of the railway, from Sept-Iles, Quebec north through Labrador to Schefferville, Quebec. In 1968 there … Read more

Travel to Batumi

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The following is a letter my dad wrote and filed at the Canadian embassy in Moscow to advise new residents about traveling to the resort city of Batumi (Georgia). I have reformatted it for the web and added some footnotes, but I kept the grammar and punctuation as it was. TRAVEL TO BATUMI To let … Read more

Running the Route

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Drone view of a CN freight train on the Canadian prairie, lit by early morning sun

I railfanned a lot in 2021. Looking back, it seems like every spare moment was spent trackside, or driving to and from railway tracks. I think it was an escape mechanism, to keep myself busy and avoid the sad thoughts I was having. It worked for a while.

After the PDC

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Composite image of two Canadian Pacific Railway trains

Early in the summer of 2021, the Prairie Dog Central participated in the filming of The Porter, a CBC miniseries about Black railway porters. As I was driving away from recording the PDC train, I saw that a train was approaching from the west.