See Flimsies Oct 10

Looks like the "Railway Coastal Museum" is distancing itself from the "railway" part. A visit to the website shows no actual mention of railway cars or locomotives on display. One buried picture caption refers to "their train in back of the station".


http://www.railwaycoastalmuseum.ca/

It's too bad what happened in Newfoundland, as the railway was intact until 1988 and I recall there was some movement to save it. A lot of the equipment was donated to on-line communities, but some was so neglected it was later scrapped. More recent photos of some of it still shows neglect, and that will probably be scrapped eventually also. Only one mainline steam locomotive, a 4-6-2 survives, still in reasonable shape. The modern Mikados were scrapped about 1957, being less than ten years old. The road's GM diesels were unique and those that were not donated ended up in South America. I think the only rail left is a short branch that they run motorcars on. This was a unique operation in North America, which had modern, streamlined passenger cars.

I rode the mixed train on the mainline that last summer of 1988 from Bishops Falls to Corner Brook. Even at that late date it was still a unique classic operation. When I left the island I never wanted to look back. Now I can see what happened.

My dad made a week-long trip to the 'rock' in the Summer of 1983 and walked away with some great images. He's put a program together on the trip a few times, always receiving great reviews. Sadly not much is left; It's understandable why CN would have wanted to rid itself of this 'basket case' operation (As they say, if the railroad in Newfoundland didn't have bad, it would have had no luck at all).

This past weekend I was up on the CN mainline across the top of Maine; With a lull between trains we were flipping through a 1970 CN timetable for eastern Quebec that my dad had brought along. Amazing to see how much has changed (or lost) in the past three decades in the Quebec-Maritime region. As our friend said sarcastically "Glad I wasn't around back then, there was just to much to shoot." Even still, with allot of mileage lost, Eastern Canada is still very much worth the trip and still home to some interesting operations.

-Justin Franz