CN Regina Line Car Control Manual

This is the CN Regina Line Car Control manual, dated June 15, 1981. It detailed the railway subdivisions around Regina, Saskatchewan including yards, sidings and industries. This include details on what customers were served by which pieces of track, and all tracks had a designation to allow CN to track rail car movements using their … Read more

Thanking My Blog Partners

I want to take a moment to thank my “blog partners”, other railway bloggers who have linked to my site, either in their sidebar or in their blog posts. I appreciate the referrals and here I would like to pay it back. Looking at my statistics, I see four different sites that have sent people … Read more

School in the USSR

When my family lived in Moscow, USSR between 1977 and 1979, my sister and I went to a school called the Anglo-American School of Moscow. This was a 5 story concrete building that housed students from English speaking embassies, so this included Canadians, Americans, Australians, British and so forth. We were both attending grades 6 and 7.

CN Regina Terminal Car Control Manual

This is the CN Regina Terminal car control manual dated June 15, 1981. These manuals were issued to employees, and depict the CN track in the city of Regina, Saskatchewan. They include details on what customers were served by which pieces of track, and all tracks had a designation to allow CN to track rail … Read more

A National Disgrace

I had another post scheduled for today, but it was just a post about trains and that’s not terribly important to me right now, given the discovery of the remains of 215 children buried at a former residential school in Kamloops, BC. What I feel is important is to take more than a moment to … Read more

Current Projects May 2021

I thought it might be time for an update on some projects I’ve been working on. This is a way for me to be accountable to myself and also to convince myself that I actually accomplished something since my last update in late November.

Critters

TNVR 12 in Thurso, Quebec, Aug 1976. Photographer unknown.

Industries with railway sidings often need to move rail cars around. Large industries like refineries, paper mills, and grain elevators often have multiple cars on site at once and may need to move cars in and out of specific locations to load or unload them. Industries often used small industrial locomotives to do this work. … Read more

Hockey in the USSR

Red banner with Soviet hammer and sickle on the left, crossed hockey sticks in the middle and a Canadian flag on the right

When we lived in Moscow back in the late 1970s, there wasn’t a lot to do. Russian television was of course broadcast in Russian, which I didn’t understand, and seemed to be mostly state propaganda. I read voraciously from the school library, but for family activities, we were pretty limited in what we could do. … Read more

Writing About Writing

In the little “about me” section on various web sites and services, I used to write “I like to tell stories”. These days, I usually have something like “I like trains” or “I am a photographer who specializes in trains and grain elevators”, but I still like to tell stories.