Caption: I can honestly say that up until 2019 I had never been able to photograph a train on my birthday. It's not a streak that I was trying to break or ever really cared for, however sometimes you just end-up re-writing history due to circumstance. It's hard to explain it, but when you turn 40, the best way I can desbribe it is that it becomes a time stamp no matter if you want it to or not. That entire day I was just trying to take it in and roll with it going through all the normal motions of family life, work and then family. Everything was the same old, except a little more special being of course ones birthday. Then on the way home came texts that a late running L568 was departing Kitchener for Stratford putting my route directly in it's path.
So I stopped at Petersburg and waited it out. I had beat L568 there by several miunutes so all I had was time. And it was in those few miunutes where I was actually able to take it all in. Four decades with almost the last 30 camera in hand beside the Guelph Subdivision photographing trains in some form. From CN, to GEXR, back to CN that's when 40 years hit me. In the distance like countless times before, the approaching rumble of a westbound on the line I grew-up with made me feel that everything was right in the world, sounding even more speicial that evening.