MORE TRAIN PHOTOS.
One thing that I've been doing the past week or so has been going around to several different places in Ottawa to take more train photos.Last weekend, my brother Nick went to Toronto to visit his girlfriend, so he wanted me to check in to his apartment a couple of times to feed and fuss his cat, Reginald. Since he lives in the Elmvale area, I decided to stop by the main Ottawa Train Station a couple of times, to photograph Via Trains.
This is Ottawa Train Station, a Massey Award-winning structure designed by architectural firm John B. Parkin & Associates and built in 1966.
The interior is big, but not cavernous like Montreal's Central Station (Gare Centrale).
I like the locomotive models that they have on display in front of the ticket counter.
But I wasn't there to take pictures of the interior.
Unfortunately, I got there around sunset both days, so only a couple of the pictures of the trains themselves turned out halfway decent.
A Via Rail General Motors Diesel F40PH-2 locomotive, pointing towards Montreal.
A Via Rail General Electric P42 Genesis locomotive, pointing towards Toronto.
That's all of the train photos I took last weekend that are worth posting, though, while I was at the station, I grabbed a Via Rail train schedule for future use.
On Wednesday, I had another appointment to see an employment counselor in the Mechanicsville area of western Ottawa. Since I was near Bayview station anyway, I thought I'd actually ride the O-Train all of the way to Greenboro so I could visit South Keys shopping centre.
Here are some shots of the O-Train taken from the Scott street bridge.
I took this photo of an O-Train on the platform at Bayview station, though it pulled out of the station without me, so I had to wait for the next one, but it's only a 15 minute wait, and I wanted to take some shots of the train from the platform anyway, so it's all good.
The first O-Train pulling out.
The second O-Train approaching the station.
The Bombardier Talent BR643 "locomotive" car has a definite "face", and it looks happy to see me.
I got brave and took a "candid" shot of people getting on the train, though it's not fully "candid" as the guy on the right of the photo seems to have noticed the camera.
This is the interior of the Bombardier Talent "locomotive" car, with the motor under the seats and the driver sitting behind a clear glass door. According to Wikipedia, these carriages are meant for "mainline" (re: Via Rail or Amtrack intercity trains) use, so the seats are a little more comfortable than most commuter trains.
Because of poor and/or incomplete planning, the O-Train currently only covers 5 kilometres (3 miles) and five stations from north to south, with the northernmost stop being in the middle of the Breton Flats and the southernmost stop being at the South Keys shopping centre, which is really just a big box store version of a strip mall. Hence, it's commonly maligned as "the train from nowhere to nowhere", but, in the middle is the Carleton University stop, so a large part of the daily ridership is university students going north or south to catch one of the Transitway buses at either Bayview or Greenboro.
The Carleton stop is also the only stop on the line with two platforms and double tracks, with the runs of the northbound and southbound trains timed so that the northbound train passes the southbound train. Here's a northbound O-Train passing us.
After Carleton, the O-Train passes over the Rideau River, the only semi-scenic view on the entire trip (it goes through a tunnel under the Rideau Canal.)
This is looking east. I think the unfrozen open water at the bottom of the photo is the top of the rapids approaching Hog's Back Falls, about 2 kilometres to the southwest.
And, before you know it, you're at Greenboro station and have to get off the train. I think I spent as much time waiting for the train as I did actually riding it, and that is not an exaggeration. The entire trip, for those you Montrealers familiar with the Montreal-Rigaud/Dorion line, is about the equivalent riding from Beaconsfield to Sainte Anne de Bellevue in terms of distance, or from Cedar Park to Sainte Anne de Bellevue in terms of the number of stations.
Since the wait between trains is so short, the O-Train only idles at the end of the line for two or three minutes before embarking in the opposite direction.
Bye-bye O-Train!
On Friday, I wanted to mail a parcel containing two manga (if you're curious, they're Ouran High School Host Club and Strawberry Marshmallow) to a friend in Massachussetts. Since I had the Via schedule, I thought that, while I was out anyway, I might as well stop by the railroad crossing on Merivale Road when a train was about to pass through. I decided to try and get there by 4:50 p.m., when Via Rail train #47 departs from Ottawa station en route to Kingston, Toronto, and some place near Hamilton called "Aldershot", but, first, it stops at Fallowfield station, in southern Nepean, at 5:07 p.m., meaning it crosses Merivale Road at about 5 p.m. sharp.
This is the Merivale Road railroad crossing, which is a little south of the portion of Merivale Road that I'm intimately familar with. It's below Hunt Club Road and Slack Road, between Capital Drive and Macfarlane Road.
For those of you bus otaku, that's an OC Transpo Daimler-Chrysler Orion VI bus crossing the tracks.
Here it comes. The above shot was snapped manually, but the following four shots were taken with the rapid shot feature of my Kodak EasyShare C643 camera, since the train's passing by much too fast for the camera to process each shot one-by-one.
The Via Rail locomotive is another General Electric P42 Genesis.
WHOOOSHHHH!
I wanted to get another shot of the train leaving a cloud of snow in the wake, but the train was moving so fast that I got the cloud of snow, but no train.
BONUS SHOT: A winter sunset in Nepean, taken at a vacant lot on Merivale at the corner of Slack Road.
posted by Steve Brandon @ 7:01 AM
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