Ride The Rails With Benny Plant

It’s Sunday July 22 and we go to the cottage in one week’s time. I can’t wait to go! I am hoping that since our cottage is so close to Washago that my dad will take me there to watch and video a few trains. The yard there is a decent size with lots of action on the Bala Sub. At Washago is also the junction with the Newmarket Sub which has been abandoned in 1995 north of Bradford to Barrie where the Allandale yard used to be and the tracks that used to go to Washago are gone which sucks. The Canadian used to use the Newmarket Sub untill 1996 then stopped and tracks were taken out. Its shame they are gone because they could’ve been used for future GO service. Then there is Gravenhurst and hopefully a few sightings of The Northlander or Canadian. We can hear train horns from the cottage at all hours of the day or night. Kahshe Lake is right between Washago and Gravenhurst so there should be plenty of opportunity to see something.

Lots to read in the papers these days about CP Rail and Via with potential buyouts and avoiding strikes. Seems there is always news about the rail buisness.

The ATCS Monitor project continues. My dad has replaced the rechargeable batteries in the scanner and bought a charger from eBay. Still need an antennae and to make some modifications to the scanner so we can plug it into the computer but we are getting there. I am hoping we will have it all working by late August or early September. Another good thing I found out is that CN runs a switcher train on the Newmarket Sub quite often switching cars at various industries I think. My friend and I went down and saw it about 2 weeks ago on a Friday morning at about 3am, it was awesome! We missed it going up though but at least we go to see it come back down. It was 2 engines and about 10-12 cars long.

Timing is everything. Seems that sometimes we get to the crossing and nothing happens for a while and other times we get there and things happen right away. This past weekend (July15) we decided to go earlier in the morning on Sunday since we didn’t go up north for the day. We got there minutes before a big freighter came through and then about half an hour later another one came through. This all happened between 11:00 and 12:00. After that there was nothing in either direction.

We waited until 1:00 and decided to call it a day. Would have been nice to come back later but my dad wanted to do a chicken on the bbq.

One of the highlights of the weekend was seeing “The Canadian” come ripping through on Saturday at a very fast speed. It was very intimidating and hardly slowed down at all. Was about 20 cars long and was totally awesome!

My dad was happy because we found the piece of trim that came off his car when we hit a raccoon last weekend at night after being at the Vivian crossing. The car is fine but the raccoon wasn’t so lucky.

We are slowly working at getting our ATCS program working. My dad is getting his scanner fixed up and from there we will get the program working.

Stay tuned.

The problem with watching and video taping trains is that you can’t always predict when they are going to be there. Since the Bala Sub is a pretty busy line we can pretty much go there any time and not have to wait too long to see something. The Vivian Crossing is great because there is a 6,000 foot siding there and many times there will be a “meet” and that’s so cool because somebody has to wait while the other guy goes through. That’s how we got to speak to the one engineer that night. I hope that happens again. Plus there is lots of room to safely park there andd set up the camera.

Fishing for bass is made easier by using a fish finder and if only there was something like that for finding trains! Well, guess what? There is a “fish finder” for trains called “ATCS Monitor”. It’s kind of complicated and we really don’t quite understand how it works but we are in the process of learning. It’s a windows based program and also requires a radio scanner which my dad has an old one. The scanner needs some work and learning the rest will take some time but we should be able to make it work so we can see what’s happening real time. Many times we just drive out to the Vivian Crossing and wait. It’s the waiting some times that’s no fun (my dad sleeps while we wait). If we get this program to work we can use it for other lines as well. My dad is now a Mac guy and isn’t so thrilled with PC’s any more. Should be interesting.