Caption: Part 2 of my GWRS Ballast post. Here is their dumping operation at Valour, facilitated by about 2 or 3 foremen trucks worth of ballast crews, which I had essentially followed by accident from the same gas station in Assiniboia. This was actually my first time watching a ballast dumping operation in my life, but I still managed to notice a significant difference between the ballast grades used by Class Is and the type being dumped here: GWRS seems to use a heterogenous mixture of what I believe to be finer sandstones, feldspar-embedded granite, and andesite. Canadian Pacific, on the other hand, accesses a homogenous grade of andesite sourced directly from trackside mines located in Dyment, Ontario on the Canadian Shield or Swansea, BC, in the Rocky Mountains. The relatively small capacity to carry ballast based on GWRS' limited stock of open-top hoppers made the dumping operation finish within an hour of arriving. Then they ran 4062 around and ran southern style back to Horizon to reload from the pit they had compiled there.
|
Nice series Eric!