CNR 1942 Smoke at Turcot; 1956 Smoke Committee Visits Montreal

In the mid-1960s there was a refinery fire in eastern Montreal and an AM radio host commented that it looked like the area had 'received a megaton', i.e. the massive cloud of black smoke suggested a nuclear attack. 

Formal awareness of "pollution" in school began circa 1970 in a Grade 7 Science class and water pollution in the Great Lakes was our first focus.

Each era has its own priorities and zeitgeist. The Second World War had cast its own shadow over the future existence of its schoolchildren, too.

I found this transcript of an Ontario legislative committee during a routine search on the GTR/CNR's "Turcot Yard" - my own lost world of wonderful pre-school childhood memories. 

I was surprised to see the term 'Air Pollution' used before the 1960s. Probably, professional civil servants on the cutting edge of industrial hygiene were already looking at the broader environment and how we were altering it.

... Certainly, the longstanding nuisance of finding soot particulates on laundry hung out to dry (see Page 3568, search: "clothes" or "fallout" [!] ) had been a longstanding problem caused by smoke. 

While I am emphasizing only the railway-related testimony, other industrial operations are also considered. As we know from historical hindsight, 1956 was very late in the Canadian history of railway steam locomotives to be worried about their smoke.

The excerpts I have reproduced below came from an excursion taken by this Ontario committee to Montreal. In the course of their sessions, they discuss current operations at Turcot and explore the projections of change from dieselization. 

Accessible by a URL at the end of this post, the CPR President's testimony accurately predicts the end of steam - about five years in the future. 

The entire document (633 pages):

https://archive.org/details/31761114665508/page/n6/mode/1up

*  *  *

Turcot Yard roundhouse, circa 1942.
Photo by LC Gagnon.

Some time around 1942, student LC Gagnon was avoiding being too obtrusive behind the late summer grass as he photographed a transportation asset which was among the many things which were not to be photographed during the war. 

There was a war to be won: With competition from local shipping and trans-Atlantic convoys for coal, and with shortages of spare parts and skilled labour, Turcot roundhouse was creating great clouds of coal smoke. 

Over on the Ready Track beside the heated water tank (with the globe high on the mast indicating it is full of water), the white plume of steam from a raised safety valve can be seen.

After each run, most engines required maintenance, or at least an inspection, in the roundhouse. A trip to the ashpit (beyond the right margin) was also necessary. After servicing, in preparation for the next trip, fresh coal would be thrown into the firebox of an engine. The resulting inefficient combustion of the developing fire caused unburned flammable gases to escape out of the smokestack, along with small particles of soot.

... With railways playing the most important land-based role in the transportation of troops, military equipment, food, civilian workers, and commodities ... the idea of reducing air pollution for the sake of the environment, or even for the sake of human health, was not a factor which would be considered. 

The vantage point is Upper Lachine Road and the St Lawrence River exists somewhere in the distance.

Coincidentally, the community newspaper of my father's childhood home put this piece of corporate boiler plate into the public record to fill out its usual column-inches of text. It provides a nice contemporary overview of the operations pictured above. The Axis spies don't read the local papers, so don't worry.

from: Westmount Examiner; 11 December 1941; BANQ.

*  *  *

Back to 1956 and ...

Proceedings of the Select Committee appointed by the Ontario Legislature 

to enquire into certain matters and legislation 

regarding smoke control and air pollution in Ontario.

The whole section discussing Turcot and local industries starts here:

https://archive.org/details/31761114665508/page/3556/mode/1up?q=%22Turcot+Yard%22

end of first selection

*  *  *

Turcot in 1908

from: Montreal Daily Witness; 15 October 1908; BANQ.

From another archival source, comes this nice newspaper space-filler from 1908. At this point, Turcot roundhouse was a modern wonder in Canada. The yard was planned and the roundhouse was built circa 1903 to 1905. The air is almost smokeless. 

The archived scanned image was almost black - very dark. In this lightened version, above, you'll notice the relatively small size of the locomotives. Their tenders bear the large Grand Trunk numbers. 

*  *  *

If you have been following Eric's ongoing chronicle of today's CNR lawyers dealing with VIA's implementation of the new Venture equipment, you will recognize the style of some of the practices used to protect the railway's operating preferences:

VIA Ventures in Service, Part 5

*  *  *

In this second section of 1956 testimony, below, my favourite railway lawyer response to a smoke complaint is:

"They would not admit that the locomotive was operating."

The attempts to reject the Ringelmann Chart (today, it is all over the internet) perhaps suggests buying time through feigned ignorance of 'the industrial standard'.  

Pertaining to the Ringelmann Chart 'document' used in measuring smoke darkness ...

(Everyone works from Upper Lachine Road!)

*  *  *

If you've ever wondered what CPR President Norris R 'Buck' Crump (1904-1989) was like, 

the Committee questions him at Toronto, starting at the link below.

https://archive.org/details/31761114665508/page/3489/mode/1up?q=Crump

He talks about: 

Dieselization at length, mentioning the 'DCs' (I assume Rail Diesel Cars: CPR 'Dayliners'), 

Pool Trains, Lambton roundhouse smoke, his personal experiences as a railroader, 

the smoke he sees from the 16th storey of the Royal York, 

and he also discusses other railway systems he has visited. 

In the record, he is referred to as The Witness or 'A.' (answer).

Later, the Commission took him out to lunch.

*  *  *

end

Turcot Yard - Newspaper Clippings Bracketing Its Half Century

Jim Christie found the first newspaper clipping from 1908 about Turcot Yard when the roundhouse was just a year or so old. I have added the clippings kept on file by LC Gagnon regarding the end of Turcot Yard.

Considering the Turcot closing clippings as 'artifacts' you can see that official sources guided some of the content of the articles. Non-railroaders of the day had some familiarity with steam locomotive technology and they could describe the engines' appearance while operating with some accuracy.

Today people use smartphone cameras as they strive to create beautiful images (not necessarily 'documenting reality') using apps which can filter out undesired people and objects. Social media approval is often important to these photographers. Traditional newspaper photographers had different things to worry about ... documenting reality and meeting deadlines.

Newspaper photographers worked to create large black and white negatives. 'First, get the negative right!' Labouring without drones, or even the primitive biplanes of the era, photographers of railways could sometimes invent their own 'bird's eye view' by hiking up from Turcot's artificial plain to Upper Lachine Road (first image). Another climbed up on a trackside structure - to obtain the second image. 

After developing the film in the darkroom, lit with extremely dim red light which wouldn't spoil the exposed film, necessary but limited manual work was done by experienced photo artists to bring out the details of key features or people. Time was limited to prepare the photos in the hours between the printing of daily (or more frequent) newspaper editions. 

How were these images rendered? Dithered black ink on dull-white newsprint was the creative medium for the finished image. This was the forerunner of today's digital coloured pixels which can produce a standard 16,777,216 colours - while we can perceive only about 1,000,000.

As scanned, showing dithering.

To use a professional photography term ... I have 'fiddled' with the newspaper photographs. I have often blurred the coarse dithering to produce objects with continuous lines ... and then sharpened the slightly-blurred images. 

In 1962, everyone had seen an 'old steamer' so there was little artistic demand to bring out details in the photos of discarded engines which were ready for scrapping ... which the railway had inconsiderately painted black in their entirety and covered with black coal dust and soot. Similarly, daylight could only light up a limited area of the cavernous, empty roundhouse stalls. So I've tried to bring out as many historical details as possible in these photos.

The 'Fond Memories' article mentions Operation Canadian National Weekend. This was held on the July 23, 24 weekend in 1962. My father and I attended the Whale Yard static displays on the Saturday. We rode the doubleheader to Garneau on the Sunday. Coloured slides and black and white prints were made of those trips and they may yet appear in another post.

*  *  *

from: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. Researched by Jim Christie.

from: Canada Handbook, circa 1942, LC Gagnon files.

CNR official photo - see credit below.

'This photo can be nicer ... so let's airbrush that loafing hostler out of the 6205 and get rid of those two baggage cars up in Glen Yard!'

This may be from a series of posed CNR publicity photos taken with all available engines fired-up and partly outside their stalls. Once on the roundhouse roof, the photographer could simply walk around to capture different angles of the scene. 

As generalizations ...

I think it would be unusual to have this many engines dispatched for trains and competing for the turntable at the same time. If you look at the smokejack locations in the other images, you could infer that engines would normally advance into the stalls. Often this would be done using the latent steam in their boilers after dropping (or just cleaning) their fires at the ashpit - which was located away from the roundhouse. Depending on many variables, an engine's servicing would take 2 to 6 hours. 

After servicing, their fires would be restarted (or unbanked and stoked) to build up steam pressure - with their stacks under the smokejacks and blowers operating to draft the fires. Then they'd back onto the turntable. However, you'll also notice a few smaller smokejacks at the turntable end of the stalls. 

To manage the turntable/roundhouse congestion ... when ready, the steam locomotives would be run by shop hostlers out of the circular roundhouse area, to designated 'ready tracks'. Crews of regular runs would often find their power conveniently sequenced so they could just perform their necessary preparation and checks, and depart for their trains.

While the image above is deliberately impressive, it is probably not documenting the exact reality of what a busy day looked like ... One would just see a semi-circle of tender ends and none of the actual skilled work and dirty brute force labour being conducted within the relative darkness of the roundhouse. References suggest that Turcot was the busiest roundhouse on the CNR system and it often serviced and dispatched 100-130 engines per day.

The slow process of starting a coal-fired steam locomotive fire can be seen at time 23:43 in the NFB film, End of the Line.

End of the Line, NFB

Reverse side of the photo above.

*  *  *

... probably 'assistant to the general foreman of motive power'. 

CNR 1961 Third Visit to Turcot Yard, Montreal, 17 August 1961

It's time to pay our final visit to Turcot Yard. 

A month has gone by and it's a nice day, so we'll take the bus to Upper Lachine Road 

and make our way down the escarpment one last time.

First Visit to Turcot Yard, Montreal, 17 July 1961

Second Visit to Turcot Yard, Montreal, 19 July 1961

Having just turned four, I will be taking neither photos nor notes.

However, I'll respond to every request of my father to get on the pilot of each engine and wave at the camera 

... so my apologies in advance.

I do not wander around in railway yards and I do not recommend that you do so either.

1521 - Built by MLW for CNoR in 1905, numbered as 1274. Renumbered in 1957.
Preserved at Middleton Railway Museum, Middleton, Nova Scotia.

Notice that the bell and glass number plates have been removed. An impressive amount of piping is shown here on the fireman's side of the boiler. This engine was originally sold to Andrew Maclean of Gravenhurst to attract attention to his antique shop. 

Most of my data comes from Canadian National Steam Power; Tony Clegg & Ray Corley; 1969; Railfare.

Through the miracle of the internet, the museum corresponded with me about this image a number of years ago and subsequently posted it on their Facebook page. LC Gagnon would be pleased to see his photos spreading out over the internet. 

You can get an idea of some of the scale of the scrapping process as you look down the deadline. One wonders if the CNR would have undergone a partial steam renumbering process in 1957 if they had known how quickly the new diesels could take over operations. They did need to open up blocks of roster numbers for the new diesels, but still ...

5061 - Built by MLW for GTR in 1913, numbered as 181.
Scrapped Sep 1961.

3345 - Built by CLC for Canadian Government Railways in 1918, numbered as 2945.
Scrapped Sep 1961.

5268 - Built by MLW for CGR in 1918, numbered as 496.
Scrapped Nov 1961.

4193 - Built by Alco-Brooks for Boston & Albany in 1919, numbered as 1107. 
To CNR in 1928, numbered as 4207. Renumbered Nov 1957.
Scrapped Dec 1961.

6189 - Built by CLC in 1940.
Scrapped Oct 1961.

6212 - Built by MLW in 1942. 
Scrapped Dec 1961.

At the left, you can see the bottom of the ramp ... up which engines and hopper cars of coal ran to load the coaling dock. 

Right behind the tender, in the distance, you can see the roundhouse.

6212 - Built by MLW in 1942. 
Scrapped Dec 1961.

As I/we remember events, it was at this point in our visit when a CNR Constable cordially invited us to leave the property. In early 1962, a couple of fires happened (were set) in the roundhouse. So in retrospect, 'we' understood that visitors didn't belong here. 

The roundhouse was scheduled for demolition and part of the infamous Échangeur Turcot would be built squarely over its former location. In the 1990s, my father and I returned and determined the spot where it had stood.

*  *  *

Here is the article which precipitated our visits.

If you look at the date of our first visit, it is the following Monday. 

Two days after the article appeared.

Our planning department must have been in overdrive to organize three generations of us for that first visit.

My father was excited about the fact that 'people can go and take pictures of them'.

(The previous April, the two of us had visited the CPR's Angus Shops 

where he had photographed the dead locomotives through their chain-link fence.)

It isn't clear that the CNR intended that image of a photographer to be an invitation to all.

The elements of the article are enlarged below.

This may be J Norman Lowe, the CNR historian.

"It's dirty work."

Dozens of white bricks of asbestos boiler lagging 

can be seen falling off the boilers of the two engines.

CNR 1961 Second Visit to Turcot Yard, Montreal, 19 July 1961

Our second visit to Turcot occurred two days after our first. On this visit, the hostlers were turning CNR 6153 over to its engine crew for an excursion. LC Gagnon was a member of the Canadian Railroad Historical Association and he knew about this excursion either from their newsletter or from the railfans at Lachine High School - where he taught.

The defective Ektachrome slides return! The primarily red images are their natural state. On the image below, you can see a recurring peril. My intrepid Epson V600 is beginning to flame out. You can see a typical bad scan element (a red vertical line) just touching the left side of the numeral 6 below. 

The technique I have used for this series is to make a second scan with the slide inverted. The defective pixel is not located dead-centre. After revealing the 'red line' on both images, I rotate the inverted image 180 degrees to 'normal' it. The 'good 60%' of the image below is on the left side. The 'good 60%' of the inverted-slide-scan will be on its right side. I join the good parts of the two to eliminate the bad pixel element.

I do not wander around in railway yards and I do not recommend that you do so either. 

6153 - Built by MLW Apr 1929. Disposition: Exporail, Canadian Railway Museum.

Displaying a rear marker, 6153 will soon become Passenger Extra 6153. Notice that the blower is on and the exhaust is clean. You can see where bricklayers have surgically removed part of a wall so some valuable roundhouse tool could be extracted and perhaps re-installed at the CNR's new Montreal Yard shop.

In contrast to 2023 - probably all of the people here (here with authorization, that is) are steam veterans.

*  *  *

On the map below ...

A map from 1904 shows the area of Turcot Yard and is labelled with the names of some CNR and CPR railway subsidiaries and predecessors, and the 'cotes' of Montreal Island. You can also find locations such as Windsor and Bonaventure stations and the GTR facilities at Point St Charles. 

The future GTR main line through Lachine has 'loop line' status and is labelled with the locations of three stations in the east end of Lachine.

The general area chosen for Turcot Yard has the labels 'Grand Trunk Railway' and 'Montreal and Champlain Railway'. The meandering course of the St Pierre River can also be seen, terminating in straight, engineered drains.

section of: Island of Montreal; J Rielle PLS, 1904; BANQ. 

A few details about Turcot ...

At about the same time that the Grand Trunk was double-tracking its main line and making improvements to its track profiles, a new yard and roundhouse were planned for Montreal. Previously, the GTR had used an engine house, shops and yard at Point St Charles - but the space had become inadequate.

The 187 acres of land acquired for the new yard were purchased from Philippe Turcot (1791-1861). A place referred to as Turcot Village had existed on part of the site of the future yard. A significant feature of this real estate was the poorly-drained valley of the St Pierre River. Artificial drainage and millions of tons of fill (including material excavated from the enlargement of the Lachine Canal) were used to provide the area needed for the yard. The yard's original design was for 2000 cars, but this soon increased to 2500 cars. In 1909, the yard was enlarged from 4000 to 15,000 car capacity.

The roundhouse first opened with 40 stalls in 1906 and quickly expanded to 57 stalls. Turcot had the distinction of being the largest roundhouse in Canada. It retained this status throughout its existence - until 1962 when it experienced two fires and was subsequently completely demolished, as originally planned by the CNR.

The Turcot Story; Michael Leduc; 2004; Michael D Leduc Enr. ... is a valuable reference for anyone interested in this facility and its development and operation. It was the source of the information above.

*  *  *

My grandfather and I pose at the pilot.

LC Gagnon is holding his father's box camera while the latter takes this photo.

Here you can see that a couple of the cab's 'air conditioning' units are on - those white gaps above.

As many of you know, by holding the handrail along the cab roof, facing the cab and shuffling your toes along that white ledge ... the running board of the engine could be reached while the engine was in motion. You can see this arrangement better on the photo below. 

... Occasionally, one of boiler-mounted appliances might need attention as the train rolled along. Perhaps a few small children were also scooped off the tracks over the years by a daring cab-to-pilot scramble when visibility was good on tangent track ... but a train was too heavy to stop in time.

The light bulb below the cab was for the engineer's benefit - before wheel slip lights were ever invented for diesels. For example: 

At night, when cracking the throttle open to start a heavy train, the ground would often be observed to be moving as expected ... before the first exhaust was heard. 

Or ... if a slip occurred when starting at night, the engineer would quickly close the throttle and, already having observed the movement of the ground below, judge how far to re-open the throttle to match the 'ground speed'. Etc, etc. 

Time to go!

*  *  *

As we were 'just leaving' ...

6063 - Built by MLW Oct 1944. Scrapped Dec 1961.

185, 182, 187 - Built by English Electric for National Harbours Board, 1924-1926. 

Acquired from NHB in 1942. Series renumbered from 180-188 to 6716-6724 in 1969. Retired 1971-1995.

At the left is the Turcot coaling dock from which the 6153 would have been fueled.

A clamshell bucket was often used for coaling at the 'turnaround point' of these day excursions.

You can see the roundhouse in the distance.

46 - Built: MLW for GTR in 1914. Disposition: Museum, Vallée-Jonction, Quebec.

1138 - Built by MLW, 1913 for CNoR. Scrapped: Aug 1961.

... Coupled to the rear pilot of the 46.

This particular engine is also shown on Page 79 of Canadian National Steam Power; Tony Clegg & Ray Corley; 1969; Railfare.

The end of our second of three visits.

We'll be back again in August 1961!

First Visit to Turcot Yard, Montreal, 17 July 1961

I was on another PLA-NET! - Sam Kinison, 1980s.

Like a salmon swimming upstream, gathering its strength to surmount a turbulent waterfall and jumping squarely into a bear's gaping maw ... I am always drawn back to work with these slides.

Unlike that salmon, I get more than one try - and I've had many over the years. 

... Back in the 1980s, I followed the advice of my local camera store. I bought a blue filter from them, projected the slides on a white wall, and photographed the images with my SLR.

As you already know, microchips have revolutionized everything since then. Computers and upload speeds get faster, large images become easier to handle and store, websites become larger but continue to remain cost-free, editing software gets better, truly valuable supplementary resources appear on line. 

... And, as I've already exhausted all the wrong approaches, I get a little smarter about how to harness all this miraculous technology.

A veteran of black and white photography with his own home-built print-enlargement set-up. My father (LC Gagnon) started shooting colour Ektachrome slides using a Kodak Brownie Starflash in late 1960. Some of these were 'bad Ektachrome' which discoloured in just a few years to take on the appearance of the slide image at the top of this post. 

As a former CPR employee, he had had at least one authorized cab ride in a new CPR F-unit. In April of 1961, he took me on what would have been a long bus trip (from 45th Avenue in Lachine to Rachel Street) ... to photograph the steam dead line through the Frost fence at Angus Shops.

Around the time that I turned four years old, LC Gagnon saw an 'end of an era' article in the Montreal Star about the lines of CNR steam engines awaiting scrapping at Turcot Yard. On Monday, 17 July 1961 he, his father George Gagnon, and I went on another bus trip (my parents were saving to buy a 1962 VW Beetle) to Turcot. This was the first of three visits there. George Gagnon came along on the first two. 

As a matter of 'blog policy' I've recently worked to use proper names for some immediate relatives. Generally, I think these people deserve to have a 'body of work/accomplishment' on the internet associated with their names ... rather than solely identifying them as 'my relative'. 

I do not wander around in railway yards and I do not recommend that you do so either. 

It seems funny today that a high school teacher and a retired elementary school principal would take a four-year-old to a realm of exposed asbestos and broken glass. I do remember the novel experience of being up 'so high' on one of the running boards. 

... George Gagnon was born into a large family in 1899. In a rural environment it was necessary to learn to manage physical risks. LC Gagnon had had that previous experience on an F-unit and I think he recognized a unique opportunity which he wanted to share with me. 

Map showing Turcot Yard in 1952.

from: Lachine sheet, east half; 1:50,000 topographical map; Government of Canada; 1952.

Above: North of the large letters E and A, you can see an O-shaped roundhouse (CNR Turcot)

and a C-shaped roundhouse (CPR Glen Yard - primarily a coachyard).

This map was obtained by LC Gagnon.

Below: A larger area of the same top map.

It is included so you can see how Turcot was integrated into the railway system.

Angus Shops is beyond the top right portion of the map, 

however, you can see the new CPR St Luc Yard. 

from: Lachine sheet, east half; 1:50,000 topographical map; Government of Canada; 1952.

*  *  *

Aerial survey photos from 1947-8 of part of Turcot Yard.

from: Canadian Pacific Air Lines Ltd, Aerial Survey Division 1947-8 .. at .. https://archivesdemontreal.com/

The first time I saw a much smaller, coarsely pixelated image like this on an urban planning website I thought I had won the lottery. I carefully preserved it. One could make out very few details.

The top right corner shows teardrop-shaped Glen Yard, complete with its loop tracks for turning coach consists. It took me a minute to realize that I would find no stainless steel Canadian consists in this 1947-8 image. 

These images were from aerial survey series which were sequenced so they could be arranged as 'stereo pairs'. Using a stereoscope, contour lines of elevation could be drawn by a skilled operator for topographic maps. These images were not designed for railway equipment identification or to be beautiful. I have joined the best two adjacent images to present the two yards. It's kind of rough, but it works for this purpose of showing the area in which these Turcot Yard slides were taken.

Glen Yard is at the top of the escarpment and Upper Lachine Road travels along its southern side. We arrived by MTC bus on Upper Lachine Road and followed the switchback path, near the roundhouse, down the escarpment. You can see many terraced community gardens arrayed on that unusable piece of industrial land.

The long dark building (left edge) at the foot of the escarpment is the coaling dock. A switch engine would run hopper cars of coal up a long ramp. At the top of the ramp was a level covered track with hoppers on each side. The coal would be dropped into the building's coal hoppers - perhaps sorted by quality, on occasion. For refueling, an engine would be spotted with its tender's coal section under one of many chutes (you can see over 20 chutes on the north side, I think). Coal would refuel the tender using gravity - a spray of water might reduce the size of the cloud of coal dust. LC Gagnon had an enduring interest in this piece of technology.

The Turcot roundhouse is seen at the right. There are some outdoor overhead crane gantries visible to its west - if you look closely, you can see their shadows. At the roundhouse's 'five o'clock' is the inverted 'T' of the Administration building.

The photos below were taken between the coaling dock and the roundhouse.

*  *  *

Slides taken by LC Gagnon on Monday, 17 July 1961.

6218 - Built: MLW Sep 1942. Disposition: Museum, Fort Erie, Ontario.

In the captions, I have noted basic roster details from Canadian National Steam Power by Anthony Clegg and Ray Corley (Railfare, 1969). In this process, it was pleasing to discover that LC Gagnon's small sample of apparently random photos of a few good-looking steam locomotives provided a representation of most of the CNR's predecessor railways.

The photo above has always been blurred and it will always be blurred. LC Gagnon was probably quite excited that we made it here, and he was probably communicating with us. This photo has certainly been good to me. As an 11-year-old, I won the public speaking contest for my school using it and a couple of others to explain my enthusiasm for this particular engine, my lifelong association with it, and my hopes for its future.

In later years, LC Gagnon explained why so many photos were taken involving our party and the first, curiously isolated, engine we encountered. He thought we might be noticed and booted out at any moment. 

The CNR's public relations excursion engines of the era were 6153, 5107 and 6167. These were hold-overs from before the formal end of steam - so they had not required (I believe) overhauls to enable them to provide excursion service. There were strict regulations regarding how long locomotive boilers could be used before overhaul.

... Our next visit to Turcot (two days later) included watching 6153's last-minute preparations before pulling an excursion. 

I think: One hand on the automatic air brake and the other on the cutoff. It seems the independent air brake handle has been removed. This was the first steam locomotive I had ever been aboard. A kind B&M switcher crew had given us a cab ride in the US ... 

Visiting Gerald 'buzzin cuzzin' MacAdam, June 1960

It was a hot, hazy day and I remember the engines being almost cold inside. Perhaps this was due to the fact that large masses of steel will be at an average temperature and never reach the peak daytime temperature. It is also possible that some of these engines still had water in their boilers and tenders - making them even more resistant to heating up on a hot summer day. 

*  *  *

Moving on ...

8392 - Built: Point St Charles, Oct 1930. Scrapped: December 1961.

While I may straighten the image and crop foreground tracks (the Brownie took square photos) - I try to leave as much peripheral detail as I can. If you notice black margin strips - I am just showing that you are seeing the whole photo and that I didn't deprive you of any interesting details.

A couple of flangers mixed in with some snow plows.

These photos are presented in LC Gagnon official slide order ... 

but he may have numbered them to craft an interesting slide show story.

(Notice all the fresh puddles above.)

8439 - Built by GTR, 1923. Renumbered: from 8212 in 1957. Scrapped: Aug 1961.

It may seem strange to renumber locomotives just before they are all scrapped.

However, CNR probably needed long series of contiguous numbers 

freed up for all their new classes of diesels and Budd cars.

Consider that there were several companies operating in Canada which manufactured diesels back then.

The CNR was probably expected to be politically even-handed and open minded, 

as it purchased these complex machines and provided hi-tech Canadian jobs.

Ambushed by a sudden Montreal summer thunderstorm, someone had the idea to take shelter here. One thing which is interesting to notice is that everyday standard steel pipes and fittings were used to put together cabooses such as this. 

If you never had the opportunity of seeing Ross Robinson's carefully restored GTW caboose 77137 at Smiths Falls (today at St Thomas), you might be interested to notice here that there is no 'chair' for cupola occupants, just a platform with a sloped back - on which I am standing.

The storm passed quickly - but you can imagine the humidity.

Notice the cupola handrails - back then they wanted you on car rooves, if only to give and receive hand and lantern signals.

1406 - Built by MLW for CNoR in 1913. Scrapped: Nov 1961.

Notice the sand plant behind the engine's tender.

On this functional little engine, the first rounded dome is the sand dome.

You can follow the sanding pipe from it, to its discharge point in front of the leading driving wheel.

5137 - Built by MLW Jun 1920. Scrapped: Sep 1961.

4193 - Built: Alco-Brooks, USRA design, for Boston&Albany 1919. To CNR Aug 1928. Renumbered: from 4207 in Aug 1928. Scrapped: Dec 1961.

 

46 - Built: MLW for GTR in 1914. Disposition: Museum, Vallée-Jonction, Quebec.

This may be the Administration building.

3293 - Built: CLC for Canadian Government Railways 1918. Scrapped: Nov 1961.

Like Sam Kinison's retired lunar astronauts struggling to cope in a world of unbearable Arizonan trailer park banality, no railway experience since Turcot has had the same gravity. Distance from this experience only increases its significance. 

I think I return to these slides because they represent my own lost world of immense forsaken machines which had collectively travelled millions and millions of miles to places and times in history which I will never see.