Canadian Adventure: Railfan in the Rockies, CP July 1999...

In 1999, at the tender age of 18 (19 whilst I was there) I visited Canada with my parents for the second time, ten years after our previous visit...

In 1989 we travelled from Saskatoon in the prairies, across Saskatchewan and Alberta to Calgary, then onwards through the Rockies into British Columbia finishing in Vancouver. In 1999 we flew direct to Calgary, picking up a mini van before doing Banff and then heading north through Jasper, Prince George and up the Cassiar Highway to the Alaska Highway and onto Whitehorse in the Yukon (more on that perhaps another time). 

At this stage my Dad and I had a few Canadian models but this was before the great Canadian layout in the garage had been started. We were fascinated by railroading and drawn to grade crossings, bridges tunnels anywhere we thought we might see a train. Our first overnight, 28th July, was near Castle Mountain, and the above photos was my first glance of 'new' power on Canadian Pacific. Back in 1989 everything we saw was pretty much hauled by an SD40-2, here then was not just a GE but an AC too! The GE AC4400 were impressive, but I didn't really warm to their face - however I do still own an Athearn Blue-box one I worked over shortly afterwards, a purchase from a model shop in Calgary at the end of the holiday IIRC. I love this photo, you can see Dad and my shadow on the grass, photo taken as we'd walked down to the crossing from our accommodation after hearing the horns of the trains, good memories.

One loco I did fall in love with, if you can fall in love with an ugly heavy locomotive, was the SD90MAC. This was EMD's swan song, and these SD90-43MACs were rare beasts, I saw plenty more of the GE units, but the 60 I believe may have been more recently rebuilt as SD70ACEs.

These photos were taken at Field on the 30th July 1999, the yard at the bottom of the famous Kicking Horse Pass spiral tunnels. Back in 1989 all I really remembered was grain grain and more grain, but now we saw a more even balance with intermodal double stack trains as well as, obviously, plenty of grain trains. Even then I think Dad and I only managed a rake of 12 or so cylindrical hoppers, from Intermountain, one I've recently re-worked on the blog.

These photos were from slides, and I don't have a scanner. I did try using my flatbed, and placing an iPhone behind them. This did work but the scanner resolution wasn't up to enlarging them. I then decided I'd try taking photos of them, so these were placed on the iPad screen (with brightness up to the max) and taken, by hand with the iPhone 8. They've not come out badly, certainly good enough for a blog post, or printing as a 6"x4" but zoom in and you can see the pixels from the iPad screen behind. I will be posting similar topics over the next few weekends until I've exhausted this material. I hope these are an interesting insight into my travels and an overview of the topic. I'm no expert but I was massively inspired and awestruck by railroading in North America. To this day I still subscribe to Trains magazine! Have a good weekend, more soon...