JD Winkler - Track Gang Photos

JD Winkler spent 40 years in maintenance-of-way service, with CP Rail/Canadian Pacific Railway and private contractors. Among the CP gangs and crews he worked on: tie crews, Pacific #2 Steel Crew, Alberta surfacing crews, thermite welding crews, Alberta Ballast crew and various construction crews. JD has recently been sharing a plethora of his four decades of photos on social media, spanning not only his career but Canada's West from prairies, foothills and mountains. I got in touch with JD and he kindly allowed me to share these favourites, found among his hundreds of posted photos, in this post.  

JD posted many photos from more modern eras, but I find these 1980's views to be the most interesting. Today, the gangs are bigger, more mechanized, and there are no longer solid trains of boarding cars except in the most remote areas. Gangs that still have boarding cars employ construction-type pre-fab cabins on flat cars. Definitely not the tired, clapped-out and fully-depreciated former boxcars, other house cars and passenger cars that CP repurposed for human occupation! 

The top photo is one of the most modern in this post, but the spike maul and lining bar definitely still have their place today as they did two centuries ago! A word about these photos...I have not reformatted them in any way. JD notes that the photos span the 110-format (Instamatic) and 135 (35 mm SLR) eras of camera development. A progression very similar to mine through railfan photography from the Kodak Hawkeye to my first Yashica 35 mm camera. JD did not include captioning information or location with many of the photos. I suppose I could ask him. I could somehow refer to each photo and ask him for date, location and description. Um, no. I have no indication that he wanted to go through that exercise. So, this is not intended to be the usual Trackside Treasure fully-documented post. Consider it a pop-up post. 

The 1980s had a minimum of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE): blue, yellow or white hard hats, work boots and gloves. No safety vests in sight!

Occupied boarding outfit cars in the siding (above) and occupied during movement (below):

The white-fleet pre-fab units make their first appearance, backdrop for an impromptu football game:

Service sartorial splendour. Ever careful with company assets, if you forget your raincoat, you can use a CP garbage bag to keep dry, but you'll never forget your company provided that garbage bag!

Ballast sled, hauled under the track, attached to a flat car by a cable:

It's an all-weather, all-hours job.

Field Hill derailment upper tunnel

Hi-rail vehicles brought additional equipment closer to the worksite, by road and by rail. As such, they were not reliant upon flat cars to load, couple into a freight train or special movement, haul to the next worksite and unload.

Gull Lake, SK 

Alberta Steel gang at Tompkins, SK.

Back in the day of full auxiliary wreck trains (this one with a wreck dozer), prior to the advent of contractors with excavators and their hi-rail heavy equipment.

Making room on the Vancouver waterfront for additional tracks for commuter service.

Various methods for getting the track gang's machines off the flat cars.

Dumping ballast the pre-Herzog way, from former Government of Canada Branch Line Rehabilitation program cars:

Tie replacement in Calgary Alyth yard - notice the business cars, Dayliner, Service ex-passenger cars and other goodies:

Former portable stations in Saskatchewan, repurposed as Service car speeder sheds.

Motor car at Burstall (with worker)

I hope you enjoyed this trip back to a largely bygone era. Sure, steel rails are still laid on wood ties, though much else in the technology, human resources and corporate culture has changed since JD Winkler took these on-the-job photos over the past four decades. There are many more that I didn't include, showing the hard work, humour bordering on goofiness, and the sacrifice those working on the track make all across our great lone land, keeping the trains we love to see rolling safely through our magnificent Canadian landscape. Thank you, JD for giving us a window on your worthwhile work!

Running extra...

I'm dedicating this post to JD's daughter, Jennifer. I was saddened to read that in 2021, a high-school classmate with psychosis ended her life at their high school. Father and daughter shared a love of trains. As a father and grandfather, I was reminded that in the Trackside Treasure space, we usually see each other through our love of trains, too. Behind that shared interest is a person, each of us with "hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer", to quote the bard in The Merchant of Venice. 

We are more than train enthusiasts. We are enthusiastic about life, with friends and families, jobs and hobbies, views on politics, religion, current events, with things that trouble us as well as please us. By all accounts, Jennifer had an imagination and a creative side that she was going to use to enliven this world of ours in her own unique way. Talk is cheap, and calls to end violence and facilitate better mental health supports are a dime-a-dozen. But here's a case of the impact on a real-life family, not just a statistic. This was someone's life, not pictures posted to impress on social media depicting an ideal world. 

At times, this world can be far from ideal. 

Jennifer, may you live on in your Dad's memory 

and in the lives of all those you touched during your time among us.

Jenny at the Union Pacific museum in Ogden, UT. 

Immortalized by her brother's tattoo - CBC photo (above).