Caption: Canadian Pacific’s E&N Division on Vancouver Island handled Crown Zellerbach logs from Lake Cowichan to CZ’s dump into the sea at Ladysmith on trains named Nitinat for CZ’s Nitinat Logging Division. On Tuesday 1980-01-08, a snowstorm north of Duncan at the village of Westholme highlighted the northbound Nitinat log loads, powered by CP GP9s 8689 and 8530, with the telephoto view nicely capturing the angled-outward white flags which distinguished that lead unit (and a few others) from the rest of the fleet.

Completely unknown to me then, the last Nitinat log train ran just over one month later, 1980-02-13, with a happy-photographer reprieve when Pacific Logging used the same facilities for a few weeks to clear out their inventory of logs from Lake Cowichan.

Considering the posting date, a very Merry Christmas to all.