Wind Chilled Railfaning At Alyth

In case you were wondering, I never made it out to chase the CP Christmas Train on Sunday December 14th. The combination of the previous night's snow storm, bad road conditions, extreme cold weather prevented me from doing so. Maybe next year.

On to today's cold adventure.

This morning I figured I would go out and do some railfaning since the snow was still fairly new. It was cold out when I went out to brush my car here in Turner Valley, but it was even colder out in the open near Alyth Yard. With a wind chill of about -32 celcius, I did not stand out there very long before I decided to railfan from the inside of my nice warm car.

While I was there I did get some pictures of a business train heading into downtown. I believe that these are some remnants from the Christmas Train, since you can still see the light strings on the cars. If anyone has the consist of this year's Christmas Train when it was in Calgary, I would appreciate if you could drop a line or two in the comments.

Before they could head off, one of the yard crew and two crew members from the train crew had to get out on the tracks and sweep the snow from some of the switches. To start, switch Y25b was stuck with snow build-up and was "grinding" away trying to close. They cleared that one and Y25a into P Yard through Y25b to P1 & P3 tracks. Then they moved to a couple more further back towards 12th Street Tower. I think the train was on P1 track. If anyone know the tracks at Alyth, please post a comment to clarify my assumption.

At 14:06, the train was able to leave. It is unfortunate I was not able get to a better position so to avoid the poles and boxes. But it was cold outside and the inside of my car was nice and warm.

The business train consist included:

1. CP 1539
2. CP 96 Power Car
   
3. Ernest "Smokey" Smith, VC - CP 102 Business Car
4. N.R. Crump - CP 79 Business Car
5. Mount Royal - CP 73 Business Car
   
6. Strathcona - CP 82 Business Car
7. CP 401750 - Concert Stage Car
   
8. Van Horne - CP 77 Business Car
9. Killarney - CP 71 Business Car

I also managed to get some snap shots of various freight cars for future modeling reference.

I then headed down towards the Pulldown Tower to grad a snap shot of the yard map posted there.

Other than that there was a lot of chatter on the scanner which was hard to follow as there were probably a dozen different conversations going on at various intervals cutting into each other. I then decided to head to the hobby shop and spend my $50 VISA gift certificate on three Walthers CN Pulpwood Flat Cars.

Goggle Earth kmz file.

Cheers,