This is hard to believe. I've been fifty years since I started scribbling train numbers and transcribing them for posterity. Starting with this post, I'm celebrating 50 Years Trackside throughout the year 2026. In this introductory post, I will be sharing the very genesis of the train watching bug that has affected me, or more correctly infected me, to this day. We had grown up reading, riding and watching trains go by, with a strong train affinity in our family. I'm sure if the internet had come along earlier, my Dad would have been blogging and sharing his decades of trips, photos and experiences trackside just as my brother David does. However, purposely being trackside and recording observations at the tender age of twelve was something new for me. Each month of this coming year, I'll devote one post to a successive five-year slice of those 50 years - which trains I was watching and where, how, trips taken and a bit about what was happening in my life when not trackside!
Welcome aboard my train of thought!
1976-1981
As an almost-teenager in February 1976, I spent my very first uninterrupted three hours trackside just waiting for CN trains to pass by. The bleachers and team benches at the Amherst View sports field provided the seating. With the winters of the time, spring could not come soon enough. When it did, school friends from just around the corner of Manitou Crescent, Mark Reynolds and Andrew Makepeace, joined me trackside. So began the years of our misspent youth together!
We would often walk the half-mile or so north along suburban streets early on a Saturday morning to the CN Kingston Subdivision double-track mainline. Sometimes I was so excited about going to the tracks that I would slip quietly out of the house in the near-dark early morning, having slept in my clothes! One favourite pastime while waiting at the tracks was sinking old pop cans in a large, two foot-deep puddle with handy pieces of crushed limestone from nearby construction. There was nothing quite like those early mornings. If the moist morning air would allow, we could often hear the trains for several minutes before their arrival. We could hear the approaching train whistling for the County Road 6 crossing two miles to the west, or double-whistling for two crossings in Collins Bay two miles to the east. Early-morning Railiner 6114-6101-6355 heads west past the Amherst View Sports field and past the growing row of townhouses along Amherst Drive (above - just visible at centre of photo).
Before that string of townhouses was completed along Amherst Drive, we could also see eastbound trains descending the grade past the Amherst View golf course, one mile to the west. When the train finally passed us, we would take notes, and I transcribed mine at home into a school scribbler that later expanded to a one-inch binder, with a shoe-box of notebooks that kept multiplying.
June 30, 1976 saw my parents, sister and me cramming into out '76 VW Beetle for a road trip to visit my Dad's sister and my uncle 1,500 miles west in Portage la Prairie, MB. I'd return in each of the next then years, except 1977 and 1983 to visit each summer. When not otherwise engaged in souvenir shopping, dining, sightseeing and the pursuit of various cultural experiences - museums, exhibits, historical plaques - visiting the CN and CP yards was a convenient diesel-fuelled default! Of course, notes were taken there, too.
Once home, we made a day-long pilgrimage to Toronto to ride one of the summer excursions that CN and then VIA would market each year. Being able to sidle up to 6060's warm steamy side on the platform of Toronto Union Station before departure on a muggy morning was magical. The excursions operated between Toronto and Niagara Falls with a side-trip to Yager, ON. In the waning years of CN's steam program, we were often treated to seemingly-impromptu appearances of 6060 up at the sports field. It was simultaneously confusing and exciting to hear a steam whistle from home, than rush to the tracks to see if we actually heard what we thought we heard.
We made many trips to the new CN Kingston station, opened in 1974. I was reliant on my brother or Dad for a ride there in various Volkswagen vehicles. Westbound Rapido with 6781-6862-6763 on August 8 - L.C. Gagnon photo:
CN sent a large tie gang through late that summer. Upon discovering the presence of tie-nails in the replaced ties, I had a new hobby over the next three years - tie-nailing - see 1979 photos below.
Grade 8 was calling, and I was happy to be in a classroom with a sweeping view of the tracks. Knowing of my train-related distraction, the teacher kept an eye on me when trains were passing and some of my classmates even pulled the window curtains shut! But I knew the number of passing trains would eventually outlast their drape-closing tendencies!
I took up a pen to write to every railway and railroad for which I could find an address. I would ask, perhaps beg, for photos, rosters, booklets and pamphlets to add to a young railman's burgeoning learning curve. Most were surprisingly obliging, and even rejection came in the form of a conscientiously-composed, neatly-typed-on-letterhead - all but a few roads have since merged.
All the while, my brother departed for the wilds of Northern Ontario to try his hand braking on CP Rail out of Schreiber, ON. While I, too, considered such a career during my mandatory school guidance-counselling sessions, neither of us made a living out of it. With the advent of cassette tapes, I now had a new way to not only capture train sounds, but also their numbers. Cassette tapes and recorders were inexpensive, battery-powered therefore portable! They would accompany me to the tracks, and surviving cassettes carry on my squeaky, tween-age voice reciting my observations. The zenith of cassette-taping coincided with the Corridor Canadian years of the early 1980s. Dad and I would drive to the nearby Coronation Boulevard crossing to catch the early eastbound Vancouver-Montreal train, as I yelled Chateau-this and that-Manor into that condensed microphone as loud as I could!
I had to graduate high school before entering the big-hair eighties. Enrolled in a new school, Ernestown Secondary School was six miles north in Odessa, ON. We bounced along each school day, charioteered by school bus-drivers 'Flash', Art or Ken, crossing the CN once each way. What were the chances of encountering a train twice a day? Apparently pretty good. Out came the little green notepad again and again!
Notwithstanding my learning to ride a bike at 12, getting a camera at 14 and my driver's licence at 19, there was one respect in which I was ahead, not behind the learning curve. That was cross-country rail travel. My sister and I travelled west by train in 1978, then my brother and I drove the Trans-Canada in 1979.
Despite sporadic attempts at photography using my Dad's Kodak 126-format Instamatics, the one I was sent west with in 1978 gave up the ghost in Northern Ontario. My generous uncle gave me a Kodak 110-format Hawkeye once we reached Portage. It was this slim, pocket-sized plastic kaleidoscope through which I'd document life over the next six years. Anyone who has grown up in the area of digital photography won't appreciate the precariously precious process of photography in the film era. Film was not cheap. And the processing, costing up to a dollar a print made photography expensive. My friends promptly purchased their 35 mm cameras while I soldiered on with my Hawkeye, used to photograph CN 4561-3739 heading west past Kingston's VIA station to DuPont on October 14, 1978 (above). An eastbound VIA 6764-6624 through Amherstview on October 28, 1978:
Another adventure in Northern Ontario was our band trip to Thunder Bay in April 1979, aboard a Wagar Coach Lines bus. We were billeted by a band member named Rob Lucy. In spring, Thunder Bay was a grey and gloomy place. Fortunately for us, Rob could already drive, and he had a Chevette that he called The Grey S***box and he was happy to drive visiting band members: me, Andrew, Mark and Richard Faulkner down to the city-wide freight yards. One evening, a friendly crew even invited us aboard CN 7034 for some yard-switching.
Here are some previously-unpublished Hawkeye photos from my early years:
May 19, 1979 - CN 2325-2320-2553 eastbound freight at Queens East (above).
In September, 1979 we enjoyed our final ride behind CNR 6060 before it was relocated to Alberta. On an overcast day, the fall colours were blazing in the Muskokas. The next summer, my chances to see the Continuous Welded-Rail installation near home were limited by the fact I was going back to Manitoba by train in June, 1980 and for the first time on my own. Looking back, was it an alien concept to send a 16 year-old halfway across the country on his own? What could possibly go wrong?
The day before I left, I had a job interview at the Bath Road McDonald's. All went well, and I was foreseeing a career under the Golden Arches. But training sessions were being held when I was scheduled to be riding west on VIA! No surprise here, the train trip won. I had a different kind of train-ing in mind! My Uncle Wilf snapped this photo of me with my VIA travel bag (!) and my ride home - VIA No 4 - arriving at Portage la Prairie's CN station at 0700, June 22, 1980:
East of Coronation Boulevard on October 7, 1979, Centuries CN 2007-2009 are westbound at 1130:
Armed with a hammer and a too-big slotted screwdriver, I would scour the piles of ties along the right-of-way. Returning home with tools in hand and jeans pockets bulging with creosote-coated tie-nails, there were always more miles of piles to be checked. The collection ran to nearly a thousand tie-nails!
October 8, 1979 while tie-nailing east of Coronation Boulevard, VIA 6781-6628-CN 3117 are westbound on a nice fall afternoon (above). On October 21, just west of Mile 183 CN Kingston Sub, Centuries 2020-2043 lead an eastbound freight past the intermediate signals while I was tie-nailing there. (Remember photo corners?)
A visit to the 'old station'/Outer Station on Montreal Street, by this time just a small stub-ended freight yard. Crane CN 50367 rests on January 25, 1980:
East of Coronation Boulevard in August, 1980 - two freights meet - eastbound in foreground:
August 13, 1980 - eastbound VIA meets westbound CN freight:
Our second school band trip in October, 1980 to Port Moody, BC involved travelling there on CP aboard VIA! The government grant for this trip had a mandatory educational component. A group of us were drafted to a Boredom Prevention Committee on the trip west. Our produced package included a map, train schedule, berth assignments, fun facts, word puzzles and more. While some band members were assigned four to a section or three to a double-bedroom, I was able to assign myself to a roomette on the way. The quicker, less educational return trip was aboard Wardair. On the way west, we're stopped at Banff station and I'm leaning out a blue & yellow car vestibule:
VIA was born, coincident with the genesis of my train watching 'career'. Inheriting CN passenger equipment, Corridor consists I was observing in these first five years remained largely unchanged from the CN era. That, of course, changed in the next five years as blue & yellow paint flowed, the LRCs arrived and the Turbos departed for the final time.
Freight trains were operating with a plethora of American railroads' cars, even predecessors, minimal intermodal traffic, and prior to the lease-fleet freight car era. The freights I'd observed fell into a few specific categories: container (intermodal) trains; through freights with bridge traffic to/from the U.S. Midwest/New England; Montreal-Toronto freights; maid-of-all-work freights like CN Nos 317/318 with lots of chemical and misc. traffic, and short local wayfreights.
March 23, 1981 - CN 9452-9651-9428-5062-5071 led this westbound freight west of Mi 184 Kingston Sub:
March 29, 1981 - Looking east, CN 2037-2017-2041 head a westbound freight at the Amherst View sports field where we started this post looking west! The shadow of the bulbous Amherst View water tower looms over the grass!
Thanks for climbing aboard this year-long train of thought as we retrace, remember, and yes, wallow in nostalgia these fifty years trackside. Watch for an upcoming second part, 1981-85!
Running extra...
It's been a good old-fashioned winter! The snowbanks grow higher making it increasingly important to be creative when it comes to shovelled snow storage. Q: Where did the snow man keep his money? A: In the snow bank!
Check here for regular updates on how VIA's winter is going. Today, the Corridor will see an ebbing 8 LRC trains, a burgeoning 11 'HEP' trains*, and a static 30 Venture-equipped trains. (*full disclosure - six of those 'HEP' trains will be LRC Economy class cars with one HEP Business Class car. As of today, there are only 11 LRC Business Class cars left in service, with some trains having two or three, hence the shortage.) Here's VIA 4002 on the tail-end of yesterday's VIA No 45:
They say social media is bad for your health and this week I came down with a bad case of Gormick. The discussion centred on VIA's Ventures (what else is making news?) and the Oracle of Oshawa was holding court. Nobody likes a bit of humour or going tangential more than I do. But according to this 'consultant', everything is wrong, nothing works, and only he knows why. Mix that with a healthy dose of holier-than-thou, been-there-done-that, not relevant name-dropping and just plain nonsensical innuendo and it's time to swear off for awhile! Weird. Really weird.
First past the post...
Thanks to erudite Johannes Urbanski and the ever-relevant Dan Garcia for adding substantively and factually to the discussion referred to above. Nice to have some adults in the [chat] room!
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