Many railway customers only have one connection to “the outside world”. This is called a “captive shipper” and it basically means the customer has to deal with one particular railway to ship via rail, like it or not. Obviously the shipper would prefer to have options, and in some cases they have connections to more than one railway.
Such is the case for the Paterson grain terminal at the northwest edge of Winnipeg. There is a large loop track serving the elevator, and the NutraGro fertilizer terminal, and the elevator is served by both CN and CP.
CP serves the elevator via the siding track on the Carberry subdivision, a relatively straightforward connection.
CN serves the Paterson elevator through a very convoluted connection, involving trackage rights through CP’s downtown yard. I sometimes wonder why they bother, but it must be worth the effort.
Recently I came across a CP crew preparing to switch the elevator. Their train was stopped on the north track of the Carberry subdivision.
The conductor walked the train, paper in hand, checking the cars that they were going to drop off at Paterson. Once he found the place to cut the train, ten cars back from the locomotive, he set the handbrakes on the portion of the train they were going to leave behind, then called the engineer to test the handbrakes. Once they were satisfied the train was secure, he uncoupled the cars and rode the tail end as the locomotive curved around toward Paterson.
If you squint at the elevator in the shot above, you’ll see two CN locomotives at the head of a string of cars at the elevator. CN and CP were both serving the loop at the same time!
The KCS locomotive and the 10 cars curved around toward the loop and the elevator.
Meanwhile, the CN train was backing up to make room. I think they were “in the loop” and were pushing their cars backwards around the loop, but it was hard to tell from 1.5 kilometres away.
Eventually the KCS locomotive stopped just short of the elevator, with the CN train north of the elevator. The lead CN locomotive was beside the “garage” for Paterson’s own locomotive, which was tucked away inside.
You can just see the CP conductor on the ground, maybe walking forward to throw a switch.
At this point, I decided that I couldn’t see much more from the distance I was at. I hopped in my car and drove around the Perimeter to get a somewhat closer look.
From the Perimeter Highway west of the elevator, I was about 900m away from the elevator. Unfortunately, since I was facing east in the morning, the elevator and CN locomotives were completely backlit.
At least I could tell that the lead CN locomotive was CN 8869.
By this time, CPKC was done their work, and they were running light back to their train.
The whole CPKC operation took about an hour and 20 minutes. Impressive, really!
Maybe you’re asking, hey Steve, why didn’t you fly your drone to get a better look? Good question. This elevator is too close to the Winnipeg airport and I’m not permitted to fly my drone here.
I hightailed it west toward the Meadows siding to catch this train, but that’s fodder for another post…