CPR 1965 One Spot Car Shop (Agincourt & Weston)

New computer-assisted hump yard complexes using mechanical retarders were sources of pride for Canadian railways in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Smaller humps, employing small armies of yardmen, to ride the cars and act as human retarders, had been used for decades in Canada. One of Adolf Hungry Wolf's books shows this type of operation at Fort William in 1952. And in one of the CPR textbooks prepared for employee self-study (Factors in Railway and Steamship Operation, 1937) their Winnipeg terminal is described as using a small hump during slack times ... and during peak times (I assume during the fall 'grain rush') they used 'hump riders' 'with the movement considerably accelerated'. 

Switching cars by 'kicking' them down sidings was a practice which probably began deep in the mists of railway history. In contrast to kicking, you can imagine that gently uncoupling cars at the top of a small hump and letting them roll away ... saved wear and tear on both the car draft gear, and on the engineer operating a steam-powered switch engine involved with kicking cars.

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At the end of the steam age in Canada, circa 1960, the old technologies - such as 'plain bearings' (brasses within journal boxes holding car oil) and refrigerator cars using ice or heated with charcoal - were still in use. 

The industrial manufacturing techniques and metallurgy of the previous decades, and the tendency of railway technology to have a very long service life ... meant that good surveillance was required to spot mechanical defects on what were often 'legacy' railcar systems. Some of those cars had even survived the deferred maintenance of the Great Depression and the extreme service demands of World War Two.

Railway carmen were key to maintain the safety of railcar systems and to repair defects. 

When major switching operations were conducting on the consist of a through train at a terminal ... the rules in force in 1959 on the Canadian Pacific Railway (and the CNR, too) required a No 1 Test (Initial Terminal) to be conducted. A carman would check the piston travel and proper brake application on each car of the train.

Prior to this - for example on arrival - the cars would be checked for defects like cracked wheels, broken springs, and unsecured brake rigging. For cars without roller bearings, the journal oil on each car (8 locations) would be checked and/or topped up and the waste (the cotton holding and wicking the oil) was checked and repacked as necessary.

Operating crews conducting switching at the terminal might also spot car defects requiring attention. 

So with individual car inspections and routine car maintenance ... and outgoing train consist inspections ... and defect repair ... carmen had lots of work to keep them busy. 

Traditionally, most of this work was done outside at the Repair In Place tracks. Kneeling in the snow to attend to car truck components was a common pastime at major terminals ... and at points all across the railway.

Considering all of this, you can imagine the productivity and quality of work life benefits that came from the facilities described in the following short CPR Spanner article from 1965 ...

As most of us are conditioned to look at it first, I tried to ensure that the motive power in the photo below would be easy to identify. 

However, once I looked at the other rolling stock ... I think one could argue that ALL of the car types in the photo are obsolete today and would no longer be found on major Canadian railways.

If you long for the bygone days of 'plain bearings' with brasses,

here are a couple of earlier posts with images to explain the finer points

of their care and handling ...

Hotbox!

CPR 1943 - Instructions for the Care of Journal Boxes

1951 Canada Handbook Photos

from: Canada: A History in Photographs; Hall & Dodds; 1981; Hurtig Publishers.

Canada's wartime 'Minister of Everything' in 1943 -

at the wheel of the 500,000th Canadian vehicle for the war effort.

Yet another of 'The Official Handbook of Present Conditions and Recent Progress' provides the illustrations for this post. Here is the Foreward from someone whose name you might recognize ...

The 'Canada' Handbook Series was initiated in 1930 to supplement the field of the Canada Year Book by offering to teachers and pupils in the public schools and to Canadian citizens generally a brief and attractive record of current economic conditions at a price within the reach of all. The Year Book is primarily a detailed reference work and is not designed to meet the need for a popular medium of this kind. 

The past two decades have seen expansion of the national economy in every direction and, since a considerable proportion of space in the Handbook is allocated to illustrations, the editorial task of giving a well-balanced presentation in a publication of this size and at low cost becomes more difficult each year. Currently many thousands of copies are being distributed abroad through our Diplomatic and Trade Commissioner Services and it is desirable for this reason alone that the Canadian economy should be explained fairly completely. 

C.D. Howe, Minister of Trade and Commerce

Shorter version: 

The Year Book of 1933-34 (for example) is almost 4 inches thick with a hard cover ... with 2/3 of the book being tables of statistics. There are no photos. 

These Handbooks have plenty of industry-donated photos with just a few tables of numbers. They are paperbacks and less than an inch thick.

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This book was published so long ago, that the boy standing in the aisle probably retired just after the turn of the century. Many intercity passenger trains would soon be going out of style in the US and Canada. You can see the smoking/non-smoking sections partitioned by glass. This is described as an 'air-conditioned day coach'.

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Trolley buses were perhaps a compromise between the tried and true street railways and the new Brill, Mac, CC&F and GM diesel buses. As a kid I rode on trolley buses in Montreal and Vancouver a few times, and they were very quiet and emitted no exhaust. They had exceptional acceleration.

The diesel bus salespeople will tell the transit authorities that diesels can be dispatched anywhere to meet new needs and that they don't need expensive catenary. 

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This may be a CPR boxcar wheelset getting turned - guessing from the chalked number on the wheel. In addition to being a good administrative practice, getting the wheelsets back to the original cars prevented asymmetries between truck wheelsets, which could lead to hotboxes.

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'The CPR freight terminal opened at Montreal in July, 1950, provides facilities for better and quicker handling of freight. Approximately 3000 cars pass through the terminal every 24 hours.'

'Cars being pushed up the hump are inspected from an undertrack floodlit pit.'

'Cars moving down the 'hump' into the classification yard are electrically braked and switched to their destined positions.' 

... in fact this looks like the early testing and calibration of the yard equipment. Perhaps they are working with a combination of pneumatic and electric retarders. The freshly-dug trench suggests that the hump yard is not shown in its final form.

Hump yards - with human riders working as 'car retarders' - had been used for decades. Post-war technology brought about advances in power switching and power retarders - hard couplings were notoriously bad for fragile cargoes which had been factory-loaded in boxcars. Eventually modern sensing and computing power enabled the automation of most of the processes ... at least after the cut lever was actuated by a human at the top of the hump.

With many hump yards now taken out of service, one could argue that high-horsepower flat switching is the favoured way of sorting cars for their destinations. Beltpack remote control of switching locomotives still requires careful work planning ... and enough people to protect the ends of the movements.

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With the 'freedom' brought by post-war automobiles, Ottawa could get rid of its streetcar system and move its smoky and dirty downtown union railway station where it 'belonged' ... away into an industrial park somewhere. The future of transportation would be in autos and planes!

Below: Freedom!
This kind of freedom can be scaled up to fill as many traffic lanes as one might build.

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Notice the shine on this domestically-produced locomotive.

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There was a Canadian elementary school reader story which described a thin and agile man who worked to get grain samples from each corner of the boxcars. Being thin was beneficial, as there was little clearance between the top of the grain load and the ceiling of the car for him to work in - an illustration was drawn to show the dark and claustrophobic working environment. This CD Howe Handbook photo doesn't quite match my childhood images of this type of work.

The worker at the door is leaning on a 'grain door' - assembled from boards at the country elevator and set inside the door frame to enable regular 40 foot boxcars to carry grain. Once the grain door was secure and made 'grain tight' with burlap, heavy paper, or other suitable material, the country elevator loading pipe was placed into the car, and the grain load would put back-pressure on the grain door. Levelling the load with shovels was part of the routine. The density of the type of grain loaded would determine the level to which the car was filled - and the filling levels for common grains (e.g. wheat) were often stencilled inside the car. The boxcar doors could then be latched and sealed in the normal manner after the car was loaded.

At its terminal elevator destination, the regular boxcar door would be opened, and the whole boxcar would generally be seized and tilted by mechanical jaws. The grain doors would often be broken before or during this process. Shovels could be used to finish the job.

Consider the ambient light outside. This is the best lit boxcar these two have ever worked in! 

" ... remember that time the Grain Board photographer came with all his lights? ha ha ha "

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'Toronto's subway under construction. In the foreground the decking has been completed, while for the next two blocks top-lift excavation is under way. Beyond that traffic is proceeding normally.'

from: Wheels of Progress; TTC; 1953.

from: Wheels of Progress; TTC; 1953.