I’m scanning my old negatives. On one strip I found this photo that I vaguely remember taking, but I wasn’t sure of the location. Fortunately, a little online sleuthing located it.
It’s not a great photo by any means – a quick grab from the car while I was wandering around. That was back in my “I can’t find trains so I’ll photograph old railway cars” phase. Armed with my Canadian Trackside Guide, I’d search out landed boxcars, mounted cabeese and old passenger cars and photograph them.
I knew this photograph was taken in 2000-2002 – when I was shooting film and started caring about trains. It was definitely in New Brunswick, because it was between a photograph in Miramichi and another in Bathurst on the same negative strip. Judging by the
Judging by the light, these four were probably taken on the same evening as I was driving from Fredericton to Bathurst.
Staring at the boxcar photo, I remembered that I found a couple of boxcars somewhere in the Chatham – Nelson area, when I was exploring the Loggieville subdivision. Off to Google Maps!
The railway track in the foreground led me to check out railway crossings along the Loggieville subdivision. A little Google Street View work and I found the location, around 320 Brown Road in Chatham Head, New Brunswick.
The boxcars are gone now.
Fortunately, GSV has a feature where you can view the same location at different dates when the Google car visited the location. In this case, we can see September 2009, July 2013, and August 2018, the latest date.
The boxcars disappeared between 2013 and 2018.
I imagine they were used for storage. Maybe there was once a siding here and someone bought a couple of ancient boxcars from CN. Who knows? That’s part of the mystery.
Just One More Thing
My friend Tim Dryden has a much better photo of them, from 2008. The closer one was CN 546453 and the farther one appears to be 56529x.