CN 1233

By Keith MacCauley   

Some additional background on yours truly. I grew up in the hamlet of Hannon. Hannon, while not a locality ever identified on any map, is situated above the escarpment on Hamilton Mountain (as referred to by ‘Hamiltonians’). A new housing development has somewhat put Hannon ‘on the map’, so to speak.

What became known as Canadian National’s Hagersville subdivision bisected Hannon south westerly, less than a mile from my parent’s house on Glover road. If the wind was in the right direction, I could distinguish the twelve cylinder 567 chant in a SW1200RS from the sixteen cylinder 567 drum of a GP9. The branchline was the former Hamilton and Northwestern Railway (H&NW) right of way linking Hamilton with the Lake Erie community of Port Dover. Descending the escarpment, the line crossed over the former T, H & B main line in the lower city swinging on to Ferguson Avenue to do some street running prior to entering Stuart Street yard on the Hamilton waterfront. Fate of the branchline? From daily except weekend service (Extra’s occasionally on Saturday’s), the former H&NW line experienced increasingly diminished usage into the early 1990’s and would eventually be lifted in 1993. Service south from Hamilton would be suspended in the late 1980’s following the lateral displacement of the Stone Church road overpass (in both directions!) by transport truck collision. Today, portions of the ROW between Hamilton and Caledonia remain as the ‘STONE CHURCH ROAD RAIL TRAIL’, to the north, and the ‘CHIPPEWA TRAIL’ to the south.

The attached photo (taken by my younger sister) is among my all-time favourite. Unfortunately, I did not record the date; most likely 1976. I recall that we rode our bikes to the adjacent St. George’s cemetery. My sister had my parent’s Kodak Brownie Hawkeye, while I manned a Radio Shack (remember them?) CTR cassette tape recorder. The cassette tape? Long gone. So too, SW1200RS CN1233; built 1956, retired 1990. She is shown delivering a CP bulkhead flatcar load of lumber to Penn Lumber. To access the Penn Lumber siding CN 1233 and a sister would have detached from their consist and used the RYMAL siding as a run around. Sobering to realize that this took place almost half a century ago!