Canadian Railroads > MLW Monday - Six Axles on Wayfreight #85 Montreal to Ottawa

Last week, Gerry Gaugl posted some shots of CP in Ottawa from 1976, at https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?15,4485652. Included was 4502 as a trailer on the daily wayfreight from Montreal, #85, and it raised the question of how unusual it was, or wasn't, to have six-axle power on this run. This post shows three occasions when a big MLW six-axle unit was leading; I have three more scanned for a future post. Today's shots are more "for the record", limited in quality for one reason or another.
1. My first encounter with the beasts, this is the power off #85, already at the shops in Walkley Yard, on June 21, 1976. Leader is M-630 4559, all spic-and-span out of Montreal, and less clean cousin C-630M 4500. Telephoto shot from the road on the north side, cloudy day.
2. Definitely not a calendar shot. My office as a grad student working on my Masters was in Tory 4-92, facing the CP line through Carleton University. When SB trains emerged from the tunnel under Dow's Lake, you'd hear the rumble very clearly. One day I had my camera in as an experiment. The idea was, hear the train, crank like crazy to open my window (you see its frame out of focus on the right), and shoot with my 135 mm telephoto, a Soligor lens that was less than the sharpest. The Steacie Chem building crops the right side as well, and you see the spiral ramp for the parking garage. What to my wondering eyes should appear on the day I tried this out, than C-630M 4503, and trailer FP7A 4037. I didn't make out the number, but by this date, December 2, 1976, this was the last one in Script livery, I believe.
3. Move ahead more than a year, and on May 23, 1978, I caught this edition of #85 cutting through the campus at 1229 with six box cars and the van, behind M-630 4556 and FP7A 4063. The sun angle was less than ideal, too much nose and not enough flank, and this was my back-up camera, a Ricoh rangefinder that I would load K64 on when I was using B&W in the Pentax. It tended to render things a bit light, and also was a bit wide angle, equivalent to 43 mm or something like that. But it took an image, so I should be thankful.
Fred

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The three or should I say 15 shots are great. I wish that I had spent more time waiting for trains at Carlton...oh yes that was what I did instead of getting an education!
Do you ever catch the RDCs passing through the campus?

Gerry Gaugl
Ottawa ON

moonliter Wrote:
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> I wish that I had spent more time waiting for trains
> ...oh yes that was what I did instead of
> getting an education!

Me, too. Spent too much time waiting for trains on the EL and not enough time in class.

moonliter Wrote:
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> The three or should I say 15 shots are great. I
> wish that I had spent more time waiting for trains
> at Carlton...oh yes that was what I did instead of
> getting an education!
> Do you ever catch the RDCs passing through the
> campus?
>
> Gerry Gaugl
> Ottawa ON

Gerry,
This thing was hiccuping on me when trying to post, and I kept getting displays that made me think it hadn't. So I guess it rang up a few times, and now they've cleaned it up so we're down to three shots on one post. You bet I shot the RDCs, dozens of times, because it came through around about 0830 (I'll have to check my slides) when on schedule, and that's about when I was arriving on foot in the morning. Fish in a barrel, and one of the regular photo opportunities I exploited well in my lifetime. Don't ask how often I shot the return run of #52 from Hilton Mines, in the afternoon. Criminal negligence on my part.
Fred

Thanks for these shots. Until Gerry posted his photos I had no idea that the 6-motor MLW units ever ran on the Lachute sub. Because at the Montreal end those trains ran most often at night I saw them only rarely. The few chases that I did of 85 in those days were always of C-424 and RS-18 units. Live and learn. Neat suff.

Ken Goslett

kgmontreal Wrote:
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> Thanks for these shots. Until Gerry posted his
> photos I had no idea that the 6-motor MLW units
> ever ran on the Lachute sub. Because at the
> Montreal end those trains ran most often at night
> I saw them only rarely. The few chases that I did
> of 85 in those days were always of C-424 and RS-18
> units. Live and learn. Neat suff.
>
> Ken Goslett

Not that there's anything wrong with C-424/RS-10/RS-18/FP7A consists on that train, either.
Fred