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Chasing Canadians
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I’M COMING UP on my two year anniversary with Carstens, and I have to say, it’s been a great experience. Of course, many of my friends assume that because I work for the magazine, my railfanning activities have in- creased tenfold. Unfortunately, this has not been the case. Helping to edit RAILFAN & RAILROAD is just one of my responsibilities at Carstens, and between a recent move and my other personal commitments, there just hasn’t been a lot of time to pursue my fa- vorite hobby. Towards the middle of November, there were rumblings that Amtrak was going to lease some passenger equipment from VIA Rail Canada to help alleviate the shortage of equipment due to the increase in holiday passenger traffic. While it has been common for Amtrak to borrow commuter sets from its transit authority neighbors up and down the Northeast Corridor, fewer extras were avail- able because of flood damage from Hurri- cane Sandy. Much to the delight of railfans, the Cana- dian equipment to be leased included two complete sets of five Budd stainless steel coaches and two classic “Park” series dome observation cars that usually grace the rear of VIA’s flagship Canadian as well as trains serving the eastern Maritimes. I always ad- mired these trains, many originally pur- chased by Canadian Pacific in the 1950s and later transferred to and rebuilt by VIA ex- tending their service lives into the 21st cen- tury. I always wanted to travel to Canada to experience these classic streamliners, but for a variety of reasons, I was never able to do so. With an official announcement coming
from Amtrak that the VIA equipment would be used on the Adirondack between Albany- Rensselaer and Montreal during the week of the Thanksgiving holiday, it looked like I’d finally get my chance to see these trains first hand! It was time to do some planning. Above Al-
bany, Amtrak’s Adirondack runs over the north end of the Delaware & Hudson (owned
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by Canadian Pacific), a very scenic, yet very challenging chase. I had only explored this line once before back in 2006, chasing CP’s Holiday Train as it made its daylight trek from Saratoga Springs north to Fort Edward and Whitehall. It was a lot of fun, but my memories were rusty at best on how to exe- cute a successful chase.
I dragged out my trusty DeLorme New
York State Gazetteer, remembering I had recorded notes and highlighted chase routes from my last attempt. Now that I have the iPad, the DeLorme atlases don’t get used as much, but they still contain valuable infor- mation. I familiarized myself with shortcuts and side roads, and began to form a plan. I was inspired by the photography of
Kevin Burkholder, who had documented the southbound deadhead equipment move from Montreal to Albany, and also captured some great in-service shots of the VIA equipment on the Adirondack. Some recon work with Google Maps, cross-referenced with some of the photo locations I found on
railpictures.net, and I was starting to get a pretty good idea of how my chase was going to proceed. Sun angles can change rapidly this time of year, so I double-checked some of the locations I had in mind against some on- line resources (
www.suncalc.net). It helped that I was chasing the south-facing rear of a northbound train!
I kept an eye on the weather throughout the week, which ranged from questionable to miserable depending on the day. There was no guarantee how long the VIA equip- ment was going to stay past the Thanksgiv- ing rush, and I didn’t want to miss this op- portunity.
It looked like November 26 was going to be the most promising weather day (and quite possibly the last day the Canadian equipment would be running). My alarm went off at 6:00 a.m. and imme- diately I began having second thoughts. What if the equipment was swapped? What if the weather didn’t hold out? Was it worth all this driving for a handful of shots? I im-
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