Railfan Stories

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.

There was a period of time where I was so far behind in processing my photos that I gave up and threw a thousand or so images into a folder to deal with later. Last spring I threw a few hundred more in, and this is the result.

It had been a while since I took a photo of a train. A long while – about six weeks. I just haven’t been inspired to go trackside. I’ve written about this before (It’s Been a While, Seasons of Interest). However, on Christmas Eve I actually went trackside again. My wife was working that day … Read more

It’s the cat’s fault.
I had every intention of sleeping on Saturday morning, but my annoying cat Felix walked into our bedroom in the middle of the night and meowed at me, repeatedly. Apparently his food dish was empty and he wasn’t happy.

After the CP cornucopia of cargo trains, I went south to the CN main line to see some more trains. I decided to head to Nattress on the east side of the Assiniboine River.

Around Winnipeg, CN runs a lot more trains than CP does. I’d say you can see three times as many trains on CN west of the city. However, the ratio was a little more even on June 20, 2021.

During our planning for my trip to Waterloo, Ontario, my son Nick suggested that we should try to catch the CN local running down the Elmira spur through town. It’s a really interesting operation. One highlight on the route is where it runs between two buildings in downtown Waterloo en route to Elmira.