Sunday, September 19, 2010

Robert's Bank - part two "BNSF"





With the sun just rising, I managed to photograph an inbound Burlington Northern Sante Fe coal train pulled by a mix of EMD and GE units about to enter the coal terminal to wait its turn in the rotary dumper before heading back to the field in the Powder River Basin.

Robert's Bank - part one "CP Rail"



Early morning August 27, I made a trip out to Robert's Bank and managed to catch a passing CP Rail container train with locomotives 3001 & 5914 heading East out of the terminal.

Slugging it out in the Quesnel rail yard





August 22, 2010 started in Quesnel, BC where I caught up with CN remote locomotives 7045, 7267 with slug unit 260 working the former BC Rail yard under a smoke fill sky. The haze was caused by forest fire burning in the Burns Lake region of the province some 3 - 4 hours drive away. It would have been nice to see BC Rail CRS-20 alco's working but those unit's have since been parted out or scraped. It was different seeing the engineer on the ground with a belt pack around his waist, not something I see in Prince Rupert.

Gord Cooper's Smoking Gun 1968 Kenworth






Well it's been a busy summer between work and shipping a kid off to university but I did manage to squeeze in a few days on the road and fewer opportunity's to rail fan. I made it to the Houston, BC drag race at the local airport where my boys and I got to see Edmonton based Gord Copper's 68 Kenworth (Smoking Gun) make some exhibition passes down the 1/4 mile blacktop strip. The rig is powered by a twin turbocharged Detroit 8V92 engine which develops 3000+ HP (bottom end is stock) propelling it the 1320' distance at just under 100mph using up almost 3 gallons of diesel per pass.