Throwback Thursday (err, Friday!) #22 - CN Stuart Street Yard Over the Years, by Keith MacCauley

I started this post when it was Thursday, but the night seemed to get away from me, so maybe we'll call this a "flashback Friday" instead... Anyway, tonight's post features another article by my dad, Keith. It's one that I had been wanting to write for a long time, but he beat me to it! I hope to expand on it in the future, though I don't have any set time frame for doing so - one of those "someday" projects. Over to you now Keith.

- Peter.

Classic 1970's Canadian railroading in the Steel City: MLW switcher, tank cars with a "flying P" logo on them, and lots of cars with friction bearing trucks.

In the above photo, we find CN S-4 8169 (MLW 9/1956) shown sorting a quartet of tank cars at the Bay Street end of the Hamilton-located Stuart Street Yard. Nose-coupled to the veteran switcher are a trio of non-insulated 20,000 gallon (US) tank cars along with an underframe style tank car emblazoned ‘AIR LIQUIDE’. The scene is a wonderful synopsis of ‘traditional’ railroading (technically in Canada it would be ‘railwaying’, but this sounds silly!): flat switching, end cab switchers, forty foot boxcars, and of course, cabooses (or ‘vans’ in Canada). Note the cupola on the second car on the rip track.

In just over three years Canadian National would embark upon a mammoth upgrade/rebuild program on its vast GP9 fleet at their Pointe St. Charles facility that would ultimately eschew the likes of 8169 and brethren. CN 8169 would soldier on long enough to receive updated 1973 decoration with an all-orange cab (http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=3438358), but would be set aside out of service in the early 1980’s. Seemingly, except for maintenance, the old girl never wandered away from Hamilton, prior to her demise.

The non-insulated tank cars are nominal 70-ton capacity (220,000 lbs total Gross Rail Load) most likely constructed in the late 1960’s/early 1970’s. Tank cars of this size and style (so called ‘non-pressure’, non-insulated equipped with hinged & bolted manway cover and bottom outlet valve) would primarily have been deployed in gasoline and diesel fuel-, or other similar-density flammable liquid service. Similar to the S-4, bigger and better technology in the form of 30,000 gallon/100 ton (263,000 lbs total Gross Rail Load) capacity would usurp their duties and eventually render them obsolete, though not as rapidly.

Note the track parts along the path beside the occupied track and materials stacked to the right of the rip track and the collection of maintenance structures in the background. Shortly, the City of Hamilton would embark upon a bay front revitalization initiative and change the surrounding landscape forever.

Stay tuned for future instalments; see below for some plot spoilers!

- Keith.

Fast-forward nearly 40 years: the MLW's, and in fact the CN itself are nearly gone from Stuart Street, replaced instead by EMD's owned by RailAmerica, and operated by the Southern Onrario Railway. Shortly RailAmerica would be acquired by Genesee & Wyoming, bringing a wave of orange and yellow paint to the shortline. 

RLK 4001 was originally constructed by EMD in August of 1959 as Southern Pacific No. 5872. Renumbered to 3708 in 1965, the built as low nose unit would be conveyed to the Central Western Railway and then onto the Lakeland and Waterways Railway, enterprises both located in the province of Alberta. Leaving Western Canada in 2002, the well-travelled locomotive has spent the last decade on the Goderich-Exeter Railway prior to arriving in Hamilton on the Southern Ontario Railway.