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Caption: Still running on bolted rail, 6529 gives lots of bell and whistle as it passes the occupied boarding cars of CN Great Lakes Region tie gang No. 4 parked in the siding at Albany Forks on CN's Ruel Sub. You can't get much closer to the action than this! There's nothing quite like living in a flat car mounted white fleet unit in the middle of northern Ontario. Passenger trains came and went with little to no disturbance other than the lights, horn and bell. On the other hand, and especially in the middle of the night, you could hear and feel heavy freights coming for quite some time before they arrived and thundered past the accommodation units which were only a few feet from the mainline. Flange squeal, a flat wheel, or slack action really got your attention!
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Ahhh…those F units. There is something about those F units! Great shot Paul.
I remember going by those boarding cars many times when I had a summer job on the Super Continental between Toronto to Winnipeg in the summer of 77!
Holy crap Paul! I don’t know how I missed this one. Ditto the engineers comment. How many times I passed gangs like this while going to the coast for summer vacation when I was a kid in the early 60′s. The great part of this photo is we’re getting the perspective from you guys in the work train as the passenger train goes by.
Excellent!
I was fortunate to have experienced living in converted coaches, converted box cars, and then the newest purpose built white fleet (ATCO) boarding cars during my tenure at CN.
Quite the life ranging from coal oil lanterns and stoves, gravity fed showers, no toilets, and 20 men to a car, to self contained, modern, electric lighting, propane stoves and furnaces, pressurized showers, mono-chem toilets, and separate sleeping quarters.
Yeah but back then men were men and they could eat nails and spit out the heads.
Truly, when I worked on similar jobs you wished that the life was a little easier and now that it is I’m glad the new work force is enjoying it.