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I was a very spoiled Railfan in the early 2000's. Little did I know how good I had it. SD40-2's were on just about every other train, the GEVO invasion wasn't on the radar - EMD's were everywhere. We had annual visits from the Royal Canadian Pacific and/or CPR 2816, heck 2816 was in Toronto just one week later on June 12 2004 and I went for a ride from Aberdeen to Welland. However, the one thing I didn't have much of was photography skill. Most good photos I managed to take in this timeframe was mostly beginners luck. I had yet to find my footings, and while I knew what looked good, I just lacked the experience to find a great photo location and compose it properly. But sometimes, just sometimes I managed something good. This photo is surprising for many reasons, that I chose to shoot RAW - which meant I KNEW it was good - that I composed it without any weeds or other obstructions, and that it is in fact located in Guelph - what you see is the dolostone cap of an ancient seabed - in essence it's the same formation you'd find in the Niagara Escarpment but in an unusual location. With OSR Employee Brad Jolliffe piloting a CPR Crew, a dozen of us are standing on the ground, everyone except for me a patron of the  train that day - for when the train backed up to pick up their passengers, I was the sole photographer left standing, no other local railfans were present, to my amazement. If this happened today... could you imagine the crowd? We were all spolied back then and I think this tells the story to why.
Copyright Notice: This image ©Stephen C. Host all rights reserved.



Caption: I was a very spoiled Railfan in the early 2000's. Little did I know how good I had it. SD40-2's were on just about every other train, the GEVO invasion wasn't on the radar - EMD's were everywhere. We had annual visits from the Royal Canadian Pacific and/or CPR 2816, heck 2816 was in Toronto just one week later on June 12 2004 and I went for a ride from Aberdeen to Welland. However, the one thing I didn't have much of was photography skill. Most good photos I managed to take in this timeframe was mostly beginners luck. I had yet to find my footings, and while I knew what looked good, I just lacked the experience to find a great photo location and compose it properly. But sometimes, just sometimes I managed something good. This photo is surprising for many reasons, that I chose to shoot RAW - which meant I KNEW it was good - that I composed it without any weeds or other obstructions, and that it is in fact located in Guelph - what you see is the dolostone cap of an ancient seabed - in essence it's the same formation you'd find in the Niagara Escarpment but in an unusual location. With OSR Employee Brad Jolliffe piloting a CPR Crew, a dozen of us are standing on the ground, everyone except for me a patron of the train that day - for when the train backed up to pick up their passengers, I was the sole photographer left standing, no other local railfans were present, to my amazement. If this happened today... could you imagine the crowd? We were all spolied back then and I think this tells the story to why.

Photographer:
Stephen C. Host [1496] (more) (contact)
Date: 06/06/2004 (search)
Railway: Canadian Pacific (search)
Reporting Marks: CP 1401, CP 1900, CP 3084 (search)
Train Symbol: Royal Canadian Pacific (search)
Subdivision/SNS: Goderich Subdivision (search)
City/Town: Guelph (search)
Province: Ontario (search)
Share Link: http://www.railpictures.ca/?attachment_id=28668
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Photo ID: 27505

Map courtesy of Open Street Map

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4 Comments
  1. Nice. The F’s have eluded me.

  2. Now that is a nice shot. One reason of course is the locality. One would not expect terrain like that along this line. This is part of the old shoreline of ancient Lake Iroquois; (as is Dundas Peak) which was much larger than the current Lake Ontario that we are all so familiar with. As far as the caption goes, some of us never work on developing those photography skills you speak of. We are just out to record what we see. Yeah, we were all spoiled by what polished the rails back then. This is a classic example.

  3. Thanks boyos. It’s hard to hold onto something like this for 13 years :)

  4. Eric I hope you got the F’s this time. They will come back one more time too before the end of the month.

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