What train is that? Who cares? These are two questions often asked by railfans. There are some of us who want to know all the details. There are others content to watch or photograph the passing trains. I have asked both questions during my years of railfanning.
I'm currently in the 'what train is that?' camp and have been since the 1990's, though my brother was in this camp in the 1980's when, armed with a scanner and spending time trackside, he could confirm to me that the passing train was 393 or 318.
KEEPING CURRENT - WHAT TRAIN IS THAT?
That's the reason I maintain a current list of CN Kingston Subdivision Daily Freights and Times (above) in the right sidebar of this blog, and have done so since its inception. It's sort of a public service. It's nice to know how many trains traverse a given line we might want to railfan. Fortunately, the line that passes near here maintains a healthy number of trains, is in no danger of abandonment, and just might be one of the busiest stretches of track in the Canadian system. Oh, that's CN No 149 approaching Belleville (top photo).
CN'S PASSENGER TRAIN NUMBERING
CN has been through various iterations of train nomenclature in its various eras and management eras. Passenger trains used to be very logically numbered: 20-series Montreal-Quebec, 30-series Monreal-Ottawa, 40-series Ottawa-Toronto, 50- and 60-series Montreal-Toronto, and 70- and 80-series Southwestern Ontario. Within each series, the lowest-numbered train departed earliest in the day. It made sense! Now, VIA has completely bunged it up by running trains Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto, sticking 6's in front of some numbers (formerly used to denote Railiner services) and running J-trains combining two symbols.
CN'S FREIGHT TRAIN NUMBERING
If you've read your Bytown Railway Society Canadian Trackside Guide (abbreviated CTSG by most, although the CTG title is a registered mark!), you can see that CN had a fairly robust numbering system for its freight trains. CN doesn't publicize this information, so it's up to observant railfans to document and keep this information current in various forms.
100-series high priority, 200-series priority, 300-series manifest, 400-series regional, 500-series road switcher, then unit trains in the 700- and 800-series. Recently, they've used letters to further delineat train numbers such as M for Manifest, L for local, Q for intermodal (now adding Z - what is this, the Santa Fe?), U or G for unit, X for extra and even P for passenger (below). (How can you give a freight train number to a passenger train?) The Q versus Z nomenclature for intermodals has sparked some lively debate, especially among the younger generations of railfans. The entire CN train symbol is an alphabet soup including type of train, number, originating region, start per day, and date of origin, but that's another post for another blog.
On Trackside Treasure, you'll notice that I stick with an earlier format for train numbers that goes back to the UCOR/train order days. CN No 305 Eng 2296 as an example. Though this format used to be heard on the radio, most trains are identified by rail traffic controllers by their leading locomotive number now, or by the alphabet soup symbol when dealing with written documents. Crews still use the train numbers occasionally! It all depends who's talking.
WHO CARES?
So what does it all mean? Well, somewhere up in the ivory tower of CN headquarters, there are people who design services, or as CN calls it on their webpage, "We Connect the Dots" which I suppose means map dots. They "innovate, create and implement solutions" for their customers, broken down to four steps for customers: Plan, Ship, Trace and Pay. Obviously, a train doesn't leave a terminal with one car like a taxi with a fare aboard. There are cutoff times and train blocking instructions that guide how each train is built, where it runs, and when. CN was one of the first to implement Precision Scheduled Railroading, under the Tellier and Harrison management eras. I'm not going into PSR, those mens' legacies or the relative success of either, because that's another post for another blog.
CN's customers don't necessarily care which train their cars are on. They just want to know when they're getting cars, when they're getting lifted, when they're getting to their destination, and when they're getting more cars.
All we need to know is that there are reliable, predictable train pairs operating across the CN system because cars go empty one way, loaded the other way. So, each city pair needs two trains. It's not good enough for a railfan to ask, "How many trains go through Kingston each day?", and be told, "Well, that all depends...". That's a facile answer that skips over the true, detailed answer.
It's safe to say there are ten pairs of trains operating each day over the CN Kingston Sub. Every day. Yes, we can add in extra 'sections' of a given train, long-distance unit trains that happen to pass by on a given day, or special moves like maintenance, dimensional, and who knows what else?
CN'S CURRENT OPERATING SCHEME FOR THE KINGSTON SUB
CN has actually become more boring over time when it comes to nimble, creative operations for its Kingston Sub trains. When I first started tracing cars in the late-1990's, prior to a widespread 1998 reorganization, CN had some neat online operations. CN No 335 (Garneau, QC to Buffalo, NY Frontier Yard) would swap blocks with Joffre, QC-Toronto No 361 at Belleville, taking some of the latter train's cars directly to the US via Niagara Falls, bypassing Toronto. Also in Belleville yard, CN No 149 would also stop to lift a block of hot metal traffic from CN No 369. So some trains would bypass Montreal Taschereau and Toronto MacMillan hump yards. Not any more. Boring.
The other interesting information available from car tracing was discovering the service profile for each train. Except for trains that are entirely classified (I think 306 to Moncton may be one) at their destination, each train has predictable blocks built in for their online journeys. Online switching on head-end, through cars at tail-end.
Today, most manifest freights enter CN's Montreal and Toronto yards, in Montreal some only swap blocks. Most entering Toronto are broken down and rebuilt for subsequent trains to destinations south, north or west. CN No 395 (Monteal-Chicago BNSF Cicero Yard) used to be chock-full of Burlington Northern cars going straight through to Chicago. These days, with so many shipper-leased, not railway-owned cars, it's quite hard to superficially predict where those cars are coming from or heading to!
Hotter intermodal trains often bypass Toronto, coming direct from Western Canada and sometimes refuelling or recrewing along the Kingston Sub. Cuts of grain and potash traffic are sometimes tacked on (above), a practice CN seems to have learned from the ever-thrifty CP. It's all about decreasing the operating ratio (expenses divided by revenue) and providing profits to shareholders.
SO REALLY, WHAT TRAIN IS THAT?
Railfans often wonder how they can find out about individual trains. Again, the facile answer is, "Listen to your scanner, read the Trackside Guide, you'll get it". Very unhelpful. A better answer might be to look for what I'd call key cars on a given train. For instance:
- Irving Lumber loads moving west are likely 305
- long strings of packaged lumber and TBOX's are likely 369
- intermodal trains without CN or domestic containers are likely 148/149 (below)
- Distributed Power units on the tail-end of trains are usually trains originating in Western Canada.
When we travelled on the Canadian from Toronto-Edmonton in 2019, I was struck not only by the huge number of trains we met west of Winnipeg, but the look-alike nature of many of them. Cuts of lumber, sand hoppers, tanks. Next train, the same. How could I possibly tell what train that was? And who cared?
Fortunately, CN maintains the highest percentage of carload freight among the Class I's, much more than the mostly-intermodal Western US railroads. If you like boxcars, you'll love CN, especially here. Sure, there are huge amounts of covered hoppers and tankcars heading to and from Montreal (like CN No 376, below), the south shore of the St Lawrence, and places like Saint John. Power is largely interchangeable, though the number and placement of locomotives may denote a particular train.
I would suggest documenting (no surprise there!) what you see and piecing together trends and patterns in what you see. Freight schedules may vary plus-or-minus a few hours on those 10 train-pairs from day to day. Late departures, work en route, unforeseen incidents and recrewing can delay trains. But they will eventually pass by. Perhaps just after you get in your vehicle, go home, and close the front door behind you!
That's where this guide will come in handy to know the possibilities of what trains you're seeing here. I should note that I won't be updating this list in this post. It's just a snapshot as of July, 2022. CN has recently been adding some new intermodal symbols, even using their Valleyfield terminal to serve Montreal. Check the sidebar for my periodically-updated daily freights list.
**147 Montreal-Chicago Intermodal Overflow/Autoracks 1100
**271 Montreal-Flint 0930
**Not currently operating
*Current as of Jul. 2022
*Times approximate and subject to change
*Times OS at Kingston
105 Montreal-Vancouver 0600
106 Vancouver-Montreal Variable
108 Vancouver-Montreal Variable
109 Montreal-Vancouver twice weekly Variable
120 Toronto-Halifax 0100
121 Halifax-Toronto 0500
122 NEW Chicago-Halifax Intermodal xxxx
123 NEW Halifax-Chicago : Halifax to US and Montreal Intermodal + Auto Traffic West of Mtl xxxx
148 Chicago-Montreal 2200
149 Montreal-Chicago 0930
185 Montreal-Prince Rupert
186 Prince Rupert-Montreal
305 Moncton-Toronto 0900
306 Toronto-Moncton 2000
309 Joffre-Toronto As Needed 0140
310 Toronto-Joffre As Needed 2330
321 Southwark-Toronto 2130
322 Toronto-Southwark/Joffre 1900
368 Toronto-Montreal 1500
369 Montreal-Toronto 1200
371 Montreal-Toronto 1100
372 Toronto-Montreal 2230
373 Montreal-Toronto 0500
376 Toronto-Riviere des Prairies 1100
377 Riviere des Prairies-Toronto 1900
516 Toronto-Brockville As Needed
517 Brockville - Toronto As Needed
518 Belleville-Kingston 1000EB/1300WB
730 Potash Saskatoon-Saint John Variable
731 Saint John-Saskatoon Variable
874 Grain Saskatoon-Limoilou Variable
875 Limoilou-Saskatoon Variable
HAVING SAID THAT, THE DISCLAIMER
You'll notice that there is lots of wiggle room in what I've posted. There are asterisks and 'variable', for instance. As my Dad used to tell me, factories are often closed on weekends, so early-week trains are usually shorter and late-week trains usually longer. Many locals that collect those factories' cars don't operate on weekends (like CN No 519 at Mi 179, above). Unit trains of potash, grain or intermodal that cross this country can be delayed in many different provinces, so the schedules once they come east into Ontario are anybody's guess.
As I've already mentioned, this is a dynamic operational environment, where lots of things can and do go wrong, causing delays. Nobody should think therefore, that just because I post that CN No 369 passing at noon, doesn't mean that even 50% of the time, that is reliable. Or it might be.
Just get trackside and see what comes along! That's the fun of railfanning, unless you hope to pursue Precision Scheduled Railfanning!
Running extra...
After a long reign of devotion and service...
...the Queen is dead. Long live the King.
