Snapshot - March 2015

An additional view Peter took of the EB VIA back in 1983. The most common reason for what we on the CNR called single or wrong tracking would be a derailment on the other track or a track maintenance work block. In that era the Dundas Sub. was having it's rail changed out to ribbon rail.

The lead photo in today's post by Peter Mumby was originally going to be this months snapshot. It was in a group of slides passed along to me a few years ago by Bob Hannah. When I showed this slide to Peter he recognized the day  right off saying "I was there too" and in that engines cab also. Well I held off posting the photo till Peter took a look through his slide collection and to his surprise the slide number I had fell into the group of slides he took. It is now in his collection once again. At that point we decided to scan in the whole group of slides and Peter would tell us what he saw and remembers. I explained to Peter the operational reasons for the wrong tracking.

Looking once again at the views prior to posting I realized that the lead photo (the one with the open multi-level cars) are Chrysler's which means a train beginning in Windsor. This actually was a London job (the terminal I worked out of) and the train was our auto train 221. In that era we were just coming out of a rescission so this train would have had a mix of freight on the head end as car sales would have been way down. The other thought that came to mind was I could have been the head end brakeman on that train....will have to dig out my old time books from the attic to confirm....George Dutka

Added Note
On CNR even number trains are eastbound and odd numbers are westbound. So why is the eastbound train going through Princeton an odd number ( train 221). Although this train starts out east from Windsor, once arriving in Toronto it heads for the west coast. Since all but the first 250 miles is heading west a westbound number is used.