CN Wayfreight on Kingston's Hanley Spur in HO Scale

The nice weather - sunroom-type weather - will soon be here. Wheels will stop turning on my HO-scale Hanley spur layout for the summer. Prior to that speeding seasonal cessation, I snapped several shots of a CN workaday wayfreight wending its way on my version of the two-mile CN Hanley Spur prior to publishing in this pop-up post - presto!

With my ritzy-retirement-gift-to-self Rapido Trains RS-18 CN 3120 (hey, grandson, let's use this low-cost Life-Like F-7 instead - my blood pressure is spiking!!) in the lead, these first photos were taken near the Imperial Oil limestone warehouse at the foot of North Street. Esso's tank car unloading compound, surrounded by barbed wire, is just visible in front of the bulk tanks on Rideau Street. 

Passing through Place d'Armes heading to City Hall, with marine mechanical Millard & Lumb on one side and Sowards' carboniferous coal-unloading trestle served by CP on the other:

Cutting off the rest of the train to deliver this Western Maryland hopper full of coal to Crawford Fuels just before City Hall.

This spur also serves the Kingston Milling Company, whose aged, less-than-edifying limestone edifice is in evidence just behind: 

Backing into the Outer Station yard, one of my three True-Line Trains CN cabooses leads the way:

Industrial wasteland views.

Also in the yard was this CN boarding car, a reworked undecorated grey Walthers car, right at Mi 173 CN Kingston Sub's concrete milepost.

CN express boxcar and aged ice reefer:

Handling a scale test car (slightly newer than my modelled era now 1966) under the River Street bridge:

The power is back at the Outer Station:

Running extra...

Links! 

• Looks like a model! North Country Trains - one of of the few videographers to travel north to Labrador to capture resource railroading there.
• Neil Schofield's amazing New England layout, euphemistically listed as NRS8400 on YouTube.
• The Track Record - Tracking every VIA Rail trip daily. See on-time rates, average delays, and stop-by-stop performance for every route across Canada.We track every VIA Rail trip daily. See

The photo looked familiar, and it's not its use in the ad that got my attention, it's that the ad that makes the photo look better than my version of it! It was 1981, it was my Kodak Hawkeye. Steve is great, dare I say outstanding in his field (!) and I'm sure this will be an excellent presentation. The entire Waterloo Railway Exposition this August looks great for fertile modelling imaginations, and will not be merely a fallow field!

May 5 - last day of my fun and functional four-month subscription to the Railstream railcams, 99.9% of which was spent viewing VIA (and CN) operations on the CN Kingston Sub through Belleville from my easy chair: the F40's added to Venture consists as HEP backups, buffered LRC consists and Venture set serviceability. Here are three photos from that last morning (all three courtesy Railstream, LLC) showing the beginning (above) and completion (bottom) of ditching along the north track, interspersed with a visit by VIA's Set 18 (aka Lumi) on VIA No 643. 

Rather than strong backs, dull minds and shovels, this hi-rail 'hy-hoe' brings precision application of Force per Unit Area hydraulic pressure thousands of times what those individual men could do. Drainage, drainage and drainage are the three factors most important in track maintenance. I had to wonder if the spoil removed will later spoil the work done, by tumbling back down into the ditch. The foreman at the crossing had a shovel for support while looking at the white signal installations near the Geddes Street crossing.

First past the post...

Getting the layout out of the basement - today it was Kings Town School where volunteer judges were well-received at the annual Heritage Fair. It was invigorating to interview students in grades 5-8 who were clearly enthusiastic about their carefully-chosen subjects in local and national history - one of whom also built a model of that Rideau Street school!