Caption: Descending the grade out of Mac Yard, a special equipment move for the Ontario Rail Association is underway from Toronto - Beeton via Allandale on Friday, August1, 1986 for the new South Simcoe Railway. With CN engineer Gary Murray at the throttle of the pair of 4200-series GP9s, the move is well in hand for the trip. Following the power is four heavyweight passenger cars, ex-CPR 4-4-0 136, ex CPR 4-6-0 1057, three more heavyweight passenger cars, CLC DTC 22, a combine, a boxcar, another combine, three more heavyweight passenger cars, ex CPR wooden van 435398, a wooden MoW boxcar, ex CPR wooden van 436954, and in service CN van 79418.

Engineer Gary Murray has provided us with a first hand account of the move below:
Knowing this move to Beeton was in the works, I told the trainmaster that I would volunteer to take the train to Beeton on my own time. There was no precise date arranged yet but I kept waiting hoping they would use me. As time drew on I was afraid I would miss out because I had scheduled vacation quickly approaching. In the end I was given the assignment even though I was actually on vacation. I took a little slag over that from the other crews.

The original plan was to use two CNR F7A's as power so I was disappointed to see we were getting two GP9's. A Mechanical Supervisor was riding the 136 to closely watch for problems. We were speed restricted and stopped numerous times for walk around inspections. At Allandale we put the caboose on the north end of the train and ran around it. There was a huge crowd of people waiting for us. Old railroaders from the steam era and curious towns people. Many wanted to, and did, climb onto the equipment to rekindle old memories. After a good inspection and complete brake test, we left a crowd of admirers behind.

There were many more admirers enroute to Beeton as we stopped at many crossings to flag our way over. It had been a long time since any train had been over the old Milton Sub. Arriving at Beeton, once again we cut off and ran around the train so we could shove it over the crossing and leave it there south of the 8th line. There was a bit of an upgrade with poor rail conditions there causing our locomotive to struggle pushing this train. It was a characteristic of these locomotives to drop a part of their power when the locomotive was about to slip and then quickly reapply it. This was causing the slack to run out and then we would bump into the train. This happened a few times and I was concerned that we might upset some part of the consist. We eventually made it over the crossing and tied the train down. We then ran van hop back to Mac Yard . This was the last CNR move on this track.

As a footnote, our crew had a personal letter placed on our file commending us for our handling of this train. This sort of thing was so unusual that I considered having the letter mounted in a gold frame.

Scan and editing by Jacob Patterson.