In 1986, on his way west, my brother Eric was kind enough to spend hours in the lower domecar lounge of CP Rail No 1 for the purposes of documenting the two subdivisions where I spent my brief career as a trainman.
In addition, he went far beyond performing that greatly-appreciated service. He ascertained that Rolly Martin (about whom I had spoken) was the engineer on the Nipigon sub that day. Eric hot-footed his way up to the headend at Thunder Bay to introduce himself. And the rest is history.
I am pleased to finally post this complete set of his photos of the Nipigon subdivision where I spent just a little bit of my running time. Most of my spare board runs were on the Heron Bay subdivision.
Our conductor-instructor remarked it must have been the 'bright lights of the big city' which made the Nipigon sub the preferred pool for most senior running trades people. In addition, it might have been the fact that a good portion of the subdivision's track permitted faster running. As well, the subdivision was a little longer. (This was offset by terminal detention and delays getting into Thunder Bay when things were busy.)
... So, those particular employees who were masters of maximizing the monetary rewards of their demanding work probably saw advantages like this really adding up over their years of service. (In contrast, my preferred line - the scenic Heron Bay sub - often had about 8 slow orders during the winter I worked and some trips took close to 10 hours.)
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I'll explain my mileage-calibrated maps in Part 2 of this set - from Nipigon to Thunder Bay. I've included all of Eric's photos and have been greatly assisted by his careful labelling of all of them.
After 36 years, I have the monitor, computer horsepower, bandwidth and storage space to finally do them justice. They have received minimal fiddling from me. After an automatic white balance, slight adjustments were made to limited areas of an image's brightness/darkness, if needed, to bring out some details.
Horizontal photos often extend out to 1600 pixels and maps reach 2000 pixels, so sliding to the right will sometimes be required to see the entire image.
The mileage shown in the photo caption area - when sidings are shown - is for the 'station' in the timetable ... not the particular east or west switch, etc.
The link below will open an employee timetable from this period in a separate tab in case you want to check on some details along the way.
Nipigon Subdivision, employee timetable, June 1 1985
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| Mile 7.0 |
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| Mile 8.0 |
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| East switch Selim, mile 9.4 |
I don't have a lot to say about the Nipigon sub, however ...
At least in the age of steam, Selim was at the foot of a 'pusher grade'
where an extra engine would couple on to the headend of some through trains
for the trip up into Schreiber.
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| Selim mile 9.4 |
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| Selim mile 9.4 |
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Selim mile 9.4
CP 4248 with work extra - dump cars, 2 flat cars, spreader (also see photo above). |
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| Formerly Rossport mile 14.3 |
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| Mile 17 |
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| Mile 20 |
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| East switch Pays Plat mile 21.7 |
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| West switch Pays Plat mile 21.7 |
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| Rock fall and slide detector, mile 25.5 |
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| Rock fall and slide detector, mile 26.3 |
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| Formerly Cavers mile 29.1 (Birthplace of Larry Leach) |
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| East switch Gravel, mile 32.3 |
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| West switch Gravel, mile 32.3 |
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| East switch Dublin, mile 42.6 |
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| West switch Dublin, mile 42.6 |
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| Mile 45.0 |
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| Mile 49 |
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| Slow order, bridge, mile 53.5 |
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| East switch Firehill, mile 54.3 |
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| West switch Firehill, mile 54.3 |
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| Nipigon mile 63.3 |
To continue, click the link below:
