Caption: CN 149 breaks the quiet calm of a beautiful spring morning in the village of Kerwood, ON on CN's Strathroy Subdivision.
This train has got to be the first intermodal train that I've ever given chase to. I had just headed to the tracks at one of my favourite locations at Waterworks Road in Sarnia, when I heard 149 on the radio. The conversation indicated that they were having issues with their power, with only one of the three units operational, and that they were making about 15 MPH (indeed, I heard the hot-box-detector give a readout of 16 MPH when they crossed it). With no indication of other traffic at that time, and given their slow rate of progress and that I was ultimately headed to the Waterloo area later that day for an operating session at my model railway club, I decided to head east to catch this train, figuring it would be an easy catch on the other side of Wyoming. And so the chase was on...
Well, I finally caught up with it on the far side of Watford, and it was not doing 16 MPH...
I got in front of it and stopped at Kerwood for this photo. The next detector they hit indicated a speed of 50+ MPH. I guess they got their issues sorted out...
Fortunately I was at least rewarded in the chase with a BCOL trailing unit.
At School Road siding, they overtook CN 509, which I caught in Strathroy.
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