Stories about railfanning – trip reports and so forth. Any time I’m trackside and writing about it, it’ll be here.
Well I look over yonder across the plainThe big drive wheels are poundin’ along the groundGonna get on board and I’ll be homeward boundNow I ain’t had a home cooked mealAnd Lord I need one nowAnd the big steel rail gonna carry me home to the one I love “Steel Rail Blues”, Gordon Lightfoot The … Read more
It was far too nice an evening to sit inside. We had fresh snow on the ground, the sun was shining, the sky was blue, and the temperature was hovering around freezing. A very pleasant evening for early April in Winnipeg.
I hate April Fools’ Day. Call me a cranky old man, but I don’t care for pranks.
This year, I chose to spend part of April 1 trackside. I hadn’t planned it, but when I awoke that Saturday morning, I felt like seeing trains.
My wife and I went to Italy in September 2022 with her parents. I was a little nervous about traveling with my in-laws for 19 days. Don’t get me wrong – I like my father-in-law and mother-in-law. They are good people. It’s just a challenge being together with your in-laws for such a long time.
The tracks run pretty straight around here. The flat prairie lent itself to straight lines and easy grades for railway planners in the late 1800s and early 1900s, so there aren’t a lot of curves on the main lines in the prairies. The CN main line west of Winnipeg is no exception.
The largest and longest train bridge in Manitoba is the CN trestle at Uno on the Rivers subdivision. Today, the bridge at Uno is a 1533′ steel trestle bridge. I visited it in April 2017.
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.
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.
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.
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.