Switching Autoport

The short chase of CN 509 from the yard in downtown Dartmouth, Nova Scotia to Shearwater was over. The two CN locomotives, pushing the tank car lifted from Irving Oil, arrived in the four track yard outside the Autoport facility.

Autoport is the anchor of this end of the CN Dartmouth subdivision. Giant, slab-sided roll-on/roll-off ships dock here and unload thousands of cars, trucks and other vehicles. Ships like EMDEN or MIGNON dock, then drivers swarm on board to get the vehicles off as quickly as possible so the ship can be on its way.

The drivers then put the vehicles into enclosed autorack cars like these, or onto truck-hauled trailers. The majority of vehicles depart by train, and CN is kept busy bringing empty autoracks here and hauling the loaded ones away. The loads are brought downtown, then placed on the daily Dartmouth-to-Moncton freight train.

The Port of Halifax’s web site says that Autoport handles nearly 185,000 vehicles per year. This article has a good overview of the operation.

Since this CN 509 had no empty autoracks, they got right to work pulling the loaded cars out. The crew had a list of cars to pull, and like most railway switching, it involved a lot of back-and-forth movements to pick out the right cars and put the others back where they came from.

Here Caleb is protecting the Hines Road crossing as CN 9418 rolls through.

Chris Mears and I stood around, talking and watching the movements. It is a little hypnotic, the repetitive motion, the push and pull of cars, all done slowly and relatively quietly. There’s no bang and crash of boxcars and tank cars clashing; the cargo is handled gently.

Below is a view of the same yard from October 2002. Sometime in the past 22 years, CN added another track here for more storage. Note that the giant tanks in the background now say Valero; they used to be Ultramar and there was a refinery back there at one time.

As the cars were picked out of Autoport, the train grew longer and longer. Soon they were blocking Hines Road most of the time and starting to block Bonaventure Street, the next street west.

This was a great opportunity to chat with Chris. He is a great conversationalist, engaged, thoughtful, and insightful. You can get a sense of that from his Prince Street blog.

Here he is, doing his thing, capturing the train, doing its thing.

Eventually the crew finished their work, and the train started threading its way out of the Autoport yard. We were caught on the “wrong” side of the tracks and had to wait for it to pass before we could get to our vehicles and start the chase back to Dartmouth.

But chase we did… one more to come.