Caption: You might recognize a couple of these units as the recent faces of 570 and 555. Well on this day, they were taken off 570 and were running as X421, and they’re pictured here in Hamilton making a lift. In this shot they’re tying onto a few gons and then they will shove further back to pick up those tanks three tracks to the right of the further yard set. The train they brought from Aldershot is pictured at left – with 42 wells, a few racks, and a big string of empty parts cars from Oakville. This proved to be too much for those two old barns, and I watched them from the foot bridge by the candy factory as they struggled to gain any momentum as they departed Hamilton. It took what felt like ages for them to make the roughly 8/10 of a mile trip from the yard to where I was by that point. They were some 312 axles over the detector at 42, and evidently this was a battle. They ended up stalling further east on the Grimsby Sub, with 2411 having trouble loading. The word is they then tried to isolate 4625, and it also ended up dying. With all of the C40-8Ms going into storage, one has to wonder if it was the last revenue run for these two. Funnily enough, I heard the yard crews ask the crew of X421 where they got that power from, and the response was "they must have found it in a museum somewhere."

531, which was in Port Rob building its train for interchange in Fort Erie and Buffalo, was called to rescue the stalled X421. With 531 spending a good chunk of their night dragging a dead X421 into Port Rob, it wasn’t able to get out on its usual transfer run. This resulted in quite the domino effect: 1) 539 did the usual duties of 531. 2) An X539 was called at 0200 to do usual 539 duties, and it outlawed at CN Duff on the return from Buffalo when it runs as 538. 3) The trainmaster then drove the crew 562 from Port Rob down to Fort Erie to relieve the crew of 538, so 562 wasn’t able to do its usual duties that day (such as build that day’s 531). 4) With 538 being so late, 422 wasn’t out until very late in the afternoon (dragging the dead 4625 and 2411 along with it), and 5) without 562 to build 531, poor 531 was hours behind schedule too.

For note keeping purposes, the string of cars with the COER gon, the TBOX, and further winding around to some new NSC hoppers and scrap loads, is 555’s lift for later that night to take back to Aldershot for the next day’s 570 to Mac. The current power for 570/555 is now 8830, 2166 and 2254.