Canadian Railroads > CN Wainwright Sub - Greenshields and Ribstone Creek

Over the last month-plus I've posted up a number of shots at Heath, east of Wainwright. Between the two is Greenshields, MP 135.3 (Wainwright is MP 140.0, Heath 127.8). It's not much, but came in handy when the sun swung around in the early to mid afternoon to be track-parallel at Heath. Greenshields is NW-SE, so we moved here to get some respectable flank light for the pair of EB we had seen in the yard. To put you in the picture, if we use the junction of Highways 14 and 41 at the east end of Wainwright as reference, you go east on the 14 for two miles, to Range Road 62 (nice farm/barn/silo complex in the SE quadrant of the obscure intersection), then south one mile to the tracks. The main road through "town" is 1 Avenue (right), on the north side. We didn't do it, but in the early morning, you'd have a good shot across a field of an EB coming up to the crossing with Rge Rd 62. Anyway, go through town to Rge Rd 61, and you're at the east end of Greenshields and a decent location, as you'll see in two of the shots that follow.
1. This is 2960 and 8934 leading #302 at 1552 on July 1, 2016. There are 60 auto racks and nothing else, so that was nice, rolling by at 57 mph and 20 degrees. The lens is set at 48 mm.
2. Next up was #108 behind 8839, with mid-train DPU 2246 and 492 total axles. Speed was 47 mph, the time 1702, and the sun had swung around a bit more than we wanted, so I went to 26 mm to get more flank light. For what it's worth, I took the going away shot of the DPU just to check light angles, and it was stellar, wrapping into the curve to the NE.
3. If you leave this grade crossing of Rge Rd 61 and go south, almost immediately you get to Township Road 442/441A/442 (it wiggles a bit heading east toward Heath). Go east, and you follow the tracks for quite a while. Just after they start to diverge, between Range Roads 54 and 53, you see this neat bridge over Ribstone Creek (CN crosses this waterway several times east of Wainwright). Parking is easy, the field is gated and fenced, but the shot is good. This is from the day before, June 30,  when we were at Heath and figured this would be a good shot mid-morning (the tracks are ENE-WSW here), when Heath's angles got sketchy. So we were lucky to get 2165 and BCOL 4643 on #316 at 1017, 448 axles of mixed plus auto racks at 44 mph and 21 degrees. The lens is set at 65 mm, and the bovine was obliging enough to look our way for the photo. As best we can tell, that neat little bridge in the field is for the cattle to cross. My apologies for the technical quality of the shot; it isn't razor sharp, and I'm not sure if I stabbed it, or if the auto focus was having trouble deciding what was the point. That's one thing I miss about my old Pentax SLR; I focused in advance on the rail head, and it was sharp every time. I can't do a wretched thing trying to manually focus with these DSLRs, there is so little rotation from close to long focus. Whine, whine, whine!
Fred

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The Wainwright is currently the busiest sub on CN, I think.  Its average daily freight tonnage is the highest on the system.

KG

Nice post....Good information and images.

611

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kgmontreal Wrote:
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> The Wainwright is currently the busiest sub on CN,
> I think.  Its average daily freight tonnage is
> the highest on the system.
>
> KG

... and it's killing me that I haven't had opportunity to get out since last November.
Fred