Canadian Railroads > Chasing CN train #341 west from Sydney, NS

On June 15, 1992 I had the luck and fun of chasing and photographing the westbound CN train #341 from Sydney, NS across Cape Breton Island on it's way to Truro, NS.  Tiruro, NS is where the tracks to/from Sydney meet up with the mainline between Haifax, NS and Moncton, NB.  This train ran six days a week, with no train on Sunday, and left Sydney, NS a little after 12 noon most days.  The eastbound counter part to this train arrived in Sydney at about 7:30 am the same day as the train #341 left.   The power from the east bound train was used on the west bound train.  I chased and photographed this train until I ran out of sunlight probably around 8:30 pm.  I photographed this train nineteen times beginning with the train leaving Sydney, NS and with the last shot taken at Antigonish, NS.  It was easy to chase this train because the top speed on this line is only 40 or 45 mph.  Best of all the weather which started out sunny with lots of clouds at Sydney changed to sunny no clouds for the rest of the day by mid afternoon 

The power on this train was CN 3577, CN 2314, CN 2112, and CN 3500, all MLWs.  The CN 3500 was added to power consist at Sydney.  This unit was having some problems which proved helpful to me when the train stopped at Grand Narrow, NS to add water to this unit.  This allowed me to catch the car ferry that ran from Grand Narrows, NS to Inona, NS.  I was the last car on the fully loaded ferry.  This put me ahead of train so that could photograph the train crossing railroad bridge cross the Grand Narrows at the town of Iona, NS..  In 1992 the highway bridge across the Grand Narrows had yet to completed thus the need for the car ferry.  The highway bridge across the Grand Narrows was completed in 1993 I think.

Attached are three photos of this train.  Photos 1 and 2 were both taken at Tupper, NS.  The first photo is the train arriving at Tupper, NS.  At point Tupper the train crew using the train's power took the loaded coal hoppers on the head end of the train to power plant at Point Tupper.  These coal cars were loaded at one of the mines located east of Sydney on east tip of Cape Breton.  In think that between 24 and 30 cars went to the power plant.

The second photo is the train put back together after the setout leaving Tupper.

The third photo was taken at Monastery, NS from the highway bridge across the tracks.  Monastery, NS is located west of the crew change point at Havre Boucher, NS.

I hope you enjoy these photos.  if you wonder why the colors of the photos are different it because two different film scanners were used to convert the slides to digital.  The scan of the first photo used my old Mircotek I900 scanner and other two photos were scanned using my new Epson V850 scanner.  The second photo is also differnt because the slide is Kodachrome 25 and the other two are Kodachrome 64.  
 

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Very nice!  It's amazing to see such how much business that part of the railroad had less than three decades ago, considering it's all gone now.

Dave

Fine photos of the Canadian National during its last period with MLW power. It is remarkable that all of this disappeared.

Well, it hasn't exactly all disappeared.  Those two locations shown are still there and active, although the brush has grown up a lot around the tracks.  The MLWs are long gone, but trains do still travel along there with paper from the Port Hawkesbury mill, and coal loaded at Pt. Tupper for the Trenton generating station.  The toughest part these days is finding a train in the daylight.

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of assuming it would always be there, even though Port Hawkesbury is only a 3 hour drive from home.  My first photographic trip was only a week or so before CN pulled out (September 1993), and the power didn't look nearly as clean as this.

The tracks east of Port H are effectively abandoned now, although not yet ripped up.

GTD

My favorite is Pic 3!!