End of Term!

Well, this is it. The train has finally stopped in Calgary, marking the end of a four month long adventure of a life time. I have been extraordinarily blessed to have this job, to see the things that I saw and experienced the things that happened. This is certainly a story to keep and to tell to grandchildren.

Here’s the final map of everywhere I went.

Google maps tells me that the total distance is about 20,000km. The earth’s circumference is just over 40,000km. I travelled half way around the world, on a train. Cool! I have also taken almost 4,000 pictures and videos during the term.

Some pros and cons about the job:

Favorite part about the job: The office window, the scenery and views I saw. That or independence, being sent off in a completely new city to fend for myself, do what I want to do, see what I want to see.

Least favorite part: No sports for four whole months. That or waking up at 5am for a 6am start, only to be delayed and hang around and do nothing until finally moving at 10am. (we had to be ready at all times in case we started moving).

Favorite weekend: close call between Winnipeg, Kamloops, or North Bay. I’d have to say North Bay though, climbing around on rocks, running along beach, being in Northern Ontario, taking time to explore what I have been passing by on the train.

Favorite thing I did: skiing in the Rockies

Favorite city: I didn’t get to stay in that many big cities. Winnipeg had a really cool bridge, but there was so much to see in Montreal, so much different architecture, so much more care taken in aesthetics and the art of buildings. I had barely begun to explore the underground area.

Favorite bridge (yes, this is a category): The pedestrian bridge in Winnipeg

Favorite part about facial hair: Not having to shave. You can also save some of the flavor from juice you drink for later.

Least favorite part about facial hair: Scratching the pillow and blankets when trying to sleep. That or the fact that everything freezes to it when it's cold outside. 

Favorite travelled area: Thompson/Fraser river canyons.

2^nd favorite: rest of the rockies

3^rd favorite: shore of lake superior

4^th favorite – Northern Ontario

It’s going to be weird adjusting back to regular life, getting back into a regular routine, being in the same place for longer than one day. I think the biggest shift will be food, having to pay attention to prices in the stores now, and not just grab whatever I want. This also means buying less pre-made stuff and spending more time cooking. Same goes for going out to eat, I have to look at the prices again, not just think about what I want or what sounds good.

This trip has opened my eyes to a whole new world that’s out there, a new way to travel and way to see scenery. Whenever I cross a train track now I’ll be looking at the track and the joint bars, seeing how good they are. And a small smile will cross my face, as I know what it’s like to travel down that way, to live on the rails. I wonder if this has quenched my desire to travel, and if I will be content for a while to stay in one place. Probably not.

My final thought, and an appropriate one I think, is that even though I visited plenty of cities, went to multiple art galleries and museums, saw towering skyscrapers and stretching bridges, sculptures of all sizes and forms, yet NOTHING created by man comes even CLOSE to the astonishing beauty of God’s creation, to marshes surrounded by green forests, the rocky Canadian shield under the spectacular fireworks of fall-colored trees, sunrises and storm clouds in the prairies, snow covered mountains, blue-green rivers, and twisting cliffs of the Thompson/Fraser canyons. That is the thing I have learned the most this trip, how much of an amazing artist our awesome God is.

I have been taking a bunch of videos from the train this term, and am in the process of compiling them together. I will post here once more with the links to them once they are finished.

Until then, merry Christmas and happy new year! And thanks to everyone who showed interest and commented and asked me how my trip was going – it was because of that that I kept this blog updated.

Last Week

We left Kamloops and headed back east to Revelstoke, then down to Cranbrook, east again to Lethbridge and then up to Calgary. We passed through some of the largest mountains that I’ve seen this trip. Most of the time it has either been too cloudy, too dark, or smaller rounded mountains. But I could see some sharp peaks during this trip.

We arrived in Calgary Wednesday morning, and spent Wednesday and Thursday testing the yard there. Thursday evening we brought the train back to the Track Evaluation shop, where it finally stopped moving for the year. One of the guys there showed me around the shop and all the other equipment they had there, from tampers to track aligners to spike pullers. But the most impressive thing was a track cleaner, where they literally took a jet engine from a B-52 airplane, attached it on the back of a truck, and added a big re-director on the back part to blow the air down. The guy said that if they left it blowing on one spot long enough that all that would be left would be the rails, all the stone and ties and spikes would be all blown away. That would be impressive to see work.

I said goodbye to the train, which had been my home for the last four months, and headed off to my hotel. Friday I had off to explore Calgary. I was pretty tired (we had been working long days that week), so I kindof just wandered around the downtown area. It was warm the last couple days, so I didn’t think about wearing much besides my jacket. But it was -15 before wind chill, which was pretty cold. So I mostly stayed inside and wandered through shopping malls and bridges. Found a pretty large garden area on the fourth floor of one shopping mall. Also went up the Calgary tower, and had a pretty good view.

On the pic on the right you can see the train tracks going past. I had gone over those tracks 3 weeks ago testing them. That was a cool feeling, knowing that I had been on there.

My flight left at 6:30, so I went to the airport plenty early, as there would probably be ridiculous traffic and lines given that it was the friday before Christmas. They turned out to be not bad at all though, and I ended up waiting around for a while. Flew to Las Vegas to catch my connecting flight to Toronto (that was the shortest trip available when I was booking). It was cool seeing all the downtown area from the air as we flew in, all lit up at night. Found some slots in the airport, and lost $14 straight without winning even once. Darn slot machines.

Caught my connecting flight to Toronto, and got picked up by my parents. Finally arrived home for good, the end of an adventure of a lifetime!

Last weekend: Mountains

We stopped in Kamloops for the weekend. Friday we went out and had a steak dinner to say goodbye to Anthony, the other co-op student. He’s leaving a week early to go home. Saturday I slept in a bit, and then took a taxi to the airport to pick up the rental car. I was driving back and passing by some mountains, and as I had nothing really planned for that afternoon, I decided to go and climb one. I only had what I was wearing, and luckily my camera, and as it was around 1:00 and it starts getting dark at 3:30ish, I decided against going back to the hotel to get warmer cloths and gloves. Boy would I regret that.

I picking the highest one (obviously), found somewhere to park and began climbing. It was easy going at first, but I quickly found that climbing uphill is actually a lot of work. I had to stop sometimes for breaks. It started to get steeper, and the patches of snow turned into a blanket of snow, which made everything very slippery. My 2 year old shoes with the tread pretty much completely gone certainly didn’t help at all. I was grabbing clumps of grass and bushes to help get up. I made it up to a flatter part, but it didn’t last long, and the real steep part began. And goodness, that was rough. The ground alternated between snow-covered grass (extremely slippery), snow covered loose gravel (also extremely slippery), and snow covered rock (you guessed it…also extremely slippery). The going was very very slow, and I had to plan my route very carefully aiming for trees and bushes. And the uphill never seemed to end. My hands were getting very cold, as I didn’t have gloves and was grabbing snow covered rocks, grass, and branches. Snow was also getting in my shoes, making my feet cold and wet. And to top it all off, it was becoming very obvious that I had forgotten to eat breakfast or lunch. There was one part where the grass clump I was grabbing ripped out and I slid down a meter or two before stopping, scraping my hand on the snow-covered rock, and I thought to myself “what the heck am I doing here. My shoes suck, I’m climbing up at like one meter a minute, it’s going to be dark very soon, my stomach’s grumbling like crazy, and I want to go skiing tomorrow. I should save some energy”. But giving up never really entered my mind as an option, I couldn’t admit defeat. I think it’s a guy thing.

So I continued up, one step at a time, one tree and bush at a time. And I finally made it to the top! It was cloudy and getting dark, so the view wasn’t all that good. I could tell that I was the highest thing in the vicinity at least, which was a pretty cool feeling.

As it was getting dark, I started heading back down, which I had been putting off as long as possible. I didn’t want to take as much time going down as I did going up, so I ended up sliding down on my but a lot, aiming for trees as most of the time I couldn’t stop on my own. Finally made it to the flat part, and down the last part to the car. I was brushing myself off, and I realized that the seat of my pants was completely ripped to shreds from sliding over rocks on my way down. Good thing I realized that before going out for supper.

I went back to the train, changed, dropped the laundry off, finally had supper, and then went to go see the hobbit, which was fantastic. That was my favorite story growing up, and it’s cool to see it on film now. Dwarves are cool. I tried to get back to the hotel, but the maps in the GPS we have are old and the roads weren’t the same. So I was pretty lost for a while, getting back at 11:00ish. As I was getting into bed, I thought to myself “jeremie, you’re dead tired. Your calves still hurt from that run you did on Thursday, you have a scraped shin, you just climbed a whole mountain on no food. And you just set your alarm for 6:35am to go and ski for a full day. You’re crazy” That made me chuckle J

Sunday I went skiing at Sun Peaks, about an hour drive out of Kamloops. They had 40cm of snow the night before, so there was tons of snow and powder, and everyone was saying how amazing it was that day. There was one run in particular where I was skiing in snow almost up to my waist, which was pretty incredible. It was really cloudy and foggy at the top, just like revelstoke. But part way down the hill there were some breaks in the clouds, and the sun even came out for a bit. The view was pretty sweet.

I was finally getting comfortable at skiing on the steep downhill parts and through powder. Before I would turn and stop, then turn and stop, but near the end of that day I was able to go continuously. I certainly wasn’t graceful, but I could go much faster than I was before. Too bad this was probably my last time skiing on a legit hill for a while.

Got back to the train at 6pm all worn out, and started all the weekend chores and shopping that I hadn’t done. I was hoping for a later start on Monday so I could get some rest, but the schedule said to get up at 4:15am. Guess I’ll get sleep Tuesday then. Wait… 3:45am wake up that day. Lovely. Ah well, it was worth it J

We are heading west back to Golden, then south to Fort Steel, west the Lethbridge and then up to Calgary, and should be done on Thursday. My flight leaves Friday evening, and after a layover in Las Vegas I arrive back home Saturday morning!

Through the rockies!!

We left Revelstoke heading west, following the Thompson and Fraser rivers, passing through Kamloops, Mission, and arriving in Vancouver before returning back to Kamloops for the weekend. And the scenery we passed through has been spectacular, by far my favorite of the term so far. Following through the canyons made by the rivers, with steep mountains on either side, going over bridge after tunnel after bridge in an effort to keep the line as level as possible.

It was interesting to follow the transition of countryside, from the snowy mountains of revelstoke to the almost desert of Kamloops, then through the much greener Thompson/Fraser canyons, before flattening out and the river getting much calmer as we approached Vancouver. Canoeing that river has now been added to my bucket list.

It was cool stopping at the end of the line in Vancouver. We started pretty far east (St John’s, NB), went as far north as possible (Moosenee), and now as far west (Vancouver).

I also added 3 bald eagles to my wildlife count, which was really cool to see those in the wild. They’re actually pretty big, big enough to be noticed travelling really fast by them. I managed to take a quick pic of the first one I saw, but the others passed by too fast to do anything but stare. It’s a really blurry pic, but it’s proof that I did see them.

During the course of this week I took 640 pictures, and after one pass through removing the bad ones, was still left with 375 very good pictures. That has been quite a pain to reduce, as the pictures I am now removing are all of very nice scenery. I’m trying to reduce them to a max of about 30 pictures per week to keep. I might have to break that rule this week. 

We are in Kamloops for the weekend, and I’m planning on going skiing again this weekend, at Sun Peaks resort. This will likely be my last chance to do so in the rockies for a while! I hope that skiing in Ontario hasn’t been ruined for me now…

Skiing in the rockies!!

What an amazing experience. I don’t even know how to explain it. It’s like eating stale bread your whole life and then going to a gourmet restaurant. Like watching house league soccer, and then seeing Lionel Messi play. Like skiing at Chicopee and Blue Mountain, and then going skiing on the ski hill with the largest vertical in North America. It’s just a totally different experience.

We parked in Revelstoke for the weekend, and Saturday I went skiing at the resort there, which has the largest vertical (1.7km) in North America. It is fairly new, only a couple years old, and has already been called the greatest ski resort on Earth (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/snowandski/9718438/Revelstoke-Canada-the-greatest-ski-resort-on-Earth.html).

I went there for 8:30 (that's when it opened), so I was in the first couple runs. I took a gondola to the base of the main hill, then another gondola to the midpoint, and then a chair lift to the top. Probably took me 20 minutes to get all the way up. The top 1/6ish (half of the last ski lift) was in the clouds and really foggy, and snowing almost all the time.  Only the top half was open cause there wasn't enough snow on the bottom. But there was a lot of snow on the top, apparently a 1.5m base. And so much powder! That’s something new to me, skiing through powder. And cause I was there at opening, it hadn't been packed down yet. I was skiing through the snow, but I couldn't see my skis, and the snow came up almost to my knees. It was really cool, and so fluffy!

I did the easier runs at first, remembering how to ski, and then moved onto some harder ones, and then went exploring through the trees. That was also really fun, making my own trail through half a meter of powder and going around trees. I then went to the advanced runs, which was pretty legit. There were rock faces and cliffs, felt like I was actually on a rocky mountain. And really steep! Some parts about 70 degrees. I had to go pretty slow down those parts. I thought I was a decent skiier, but compared to the people who just flew down the steep parts, I have a long ways to go.

The runs were very long too, most about 15 or 20 minutes. The one time I checked it took 25 minutes, but I went the long way and stopped for breaks somewhat often. It was so long that I usually can't make it all the way down without stopping to rest. When I would go skiing back in Ontario, I would decide each run if I wanted to go fast, or go slower and carve more and make it last longer. But here I could do whatever I wanted, go fast for a bit, then carve, then go through some trees, then back to the main run and go fast again, and repeat 6 or 7 times all the way down. And remember that this is only on half of the hill, their longest run is 15km of downhill skiing. That would be quite the trip.

The people there are really friendly too, I had a bunch of conversations with people on the lifts going up. I met a girl from New Zealand, a CP Conductor who had transferred from Winnipeg to here so he could go skiing more often, and a girl from France. It was nice to hear a real French accent, after having spent so much time in Montreal.

One thing I found out is that facial hair, moist breath, snow, and cold air can make a very annoying combination, with my entire upper lip becoming one large ice cube. Whenever I smiled or grimaced all the hairs would pull, so I had to try and keep a neutral expression.

The hill closed at 3:00 (which is about when it starts to get dark there), so I headed back to the hotel. Didn’t do much else that weekend, went for a walk and found a cool suspension bridge, but that’s about it. Was planning on going for a longer walk Sunday morning, but I woke up at 9ish, and checkout was at 11, so I didn’t have time. Did maintenance and chores for the rest of the day.

Next week is travelling through Kamloops to Vancouver, and then back to Kamloops for the weekend. And I’m planning on going skiing there as well!

To the rockies!

I didn't do much in Winnipeg, as I had been feeling sick most of the week previous. So I mostly stayed in bed, didn't do much exploring. 

We left early Monday morning, heading west. I don’t think I fully appreciated before just how vast the prairies are, and how big the sky is. It was cloudy Monday and Tuesday, but Wednesday was mostly clear, and that morning I saw one of the most spectacular sunrises I’ve seen, it just lit up half the sky. Pictures just don't do it justice.

It actually feels like I’m going to new places now. Southern Ontario I had all been to before, Winnipeg was pretty much in Ontario, and last time I was this far we knew we were going right back to Montreal, so the adventure wasn’t there. But this week our destination is revelstoke, in the rockies. It was cool starting Thursday morning out of Medicine Hat, finally going further west than we had ever gone, and each minute was brand new territory.

Thursday afternoon I could finally see the mountains in the distance! They were still a very long ways off though. I could also see downtown Calgary, even though we were still like 30 miles away. That certainly something that doesn’t happen in Ontario. We actually ended up going right through downtown Calgary, among all the tall skyscrapers.

It got dark shortly after that, and we couldn’t see anything. Which was really frustrating, cause I knew we were getting closer to the rockies. I was looking at the mileposts, and could see that we were passing through Banff, Lake Louise, through Kicking Horse pass and the spiral tunnels, with the supervisors saying how nice the view was from there overlooking Field. But I could barely see the trees on either side of the train.

Spend Thursday night in Field, and woke up Friday morning, knowing that we were in the rockies, surrounded by mountains, but still hadn’t seen them close up. Eventually the day started to brighten, and I could finally see the silhouettes of the mountains. We started moving, and we passed beside these huge giants, the tops reaching through the clouds. It was snowy most of the day and pretty cloudy, so I couldn’t make out much. But we passed alongside blue/green rivers tumbling over rocks and snow-covered logs. And the trees are huge!! They towered over the train, easily 5 stories tall, and when I looked down we were on a hill and the trunks went down another 3 or 4 stories. I have to climb one of them.

We passed through a bunch of smaller tunnels, and then the Macdonald tunnel, 14.7km long. Traveling at 30mph, it took us 20 min to go through it. It was a weird feeling, knowing there was a whole mountain on top of you.

I also realized that I am one of the very select few who have travelled that line and seen that scenery. VIA travels along CN lines, so the only people who travel along the CP lines through the mountains are the conductors, maintenance crews, and us. And a lot of the places are so remote that they are only accessible by train. And no one else really seems to care about the spectacular scenery going by, they are just used to it. One of the supervisors, who is from the prairies, says that you can’t see anything at all, since the mountain is right there in front of your face. I’m just thankful that I get to see it, and by train too, which is so much better than by car.

We got to revelstoke, where we parked for the weekend. There’s a ski hill here that apparently has the largest vertical in North America, so I’m doing that on Saturday. I’ve always wanted to go skiing in the rockies, it’s on my bucket list of life. So I’ll be checking that one off over the weekend!

Snow

Snow. What a love/hate relationship.

On one hand, it makes everything stunningly beautiful. I thought nothing could come close to northern Ontario during the peak of fall. But northern Ontario under a blanket of snow is also pretty spectacular.

The downside of snow is that it can really mess with the data. There’s a laser that shines on the rail, and a camera that picks up the profile of the laser on the rail. There are crosshairs that detect the top and the lip of the rail, and that’s where all the measurements are taken from. If there is snow all the way up to the head of the rail, then the camera picks up the laser shining on the snow, and the crosshairs don’t know what to do. 

Here is a typical stream of gauge measurement:

And this is the same stream when there’s a lot of snow:

The vertical axis is gauge distance, with 56.5 being the specified measurement. Depending on the class of track, anything above 58 inches could be an urgent defect. If you look at how many times the data goes above 58 inches in the bottom pic, there are a lot of urgent defects detected, none of which are valid. And that’s only over 580 feet (the bottom axis is distance in feet).

A typical subdivision (usually 130-180 miles) results in 600 or 700ish defects. A couple hundred is a good run, and anything over 1,400 or 1,500 is a bad run. These would be both urgents and priorities, with probably 95% being priorities, which no one really cares about as it’s not bad enough to worry about it. The first run that we did with significant snow, the system recorded 14,800 defects. At the end of that sub, the combined books for the track supervisors were literally over a foot high of paper. After that run we turned off a lot of the defects, and now we’re just measuring gauge and GRMS. So the books are manageable again.

The snow also clogs up the cameras, resulting in no image at all. We have a trigger near our stations that turns on an air compressor that blows air through hoses to the lenses of the cameras to clean it up, which works most of the time. The snow is also very annoying for the daily maintenance, cleaning the cameras/lasers, as well as changing the lube sticks for the deployable axle. The holes for the cameras are too small for gloves, which means bare hands have to be used a lot of the time. Ice can sometimes get stuck in the holes, so we have to use a screwdriver to scrape it off, while trying not to scratch the glass. And of course all the equipment is very close to the ground, and to clean some of them we have to get down on our backs to access the cameras, all in the cold snow. Luckily it hasn’t been too cold or too deep of snow yet, but apparently sometimes we have to get the shovels out.  

Yet even with all that trouble, the snow can still make things very pretty under the train, with cool icicles hanging from the lights. You just gotta find the positives in life J

Last week was travelling from Sudbury from Winnipeg. We were supposed to go to Brandon, but the engine died on Thursday, so we stayed in Winnipeg for repairs. The plan for next week is to go all the way to Kamloops, which means the rockies! 

Sudbury

Friday was a maintenance day, and I started cleaning up/sorting the boxcar tools. There is a huge tool chest for us to use, but the problem is that they aren’t organized properly. So if someone needs a specific tool, they look for it for a bit, can’t find it, so they go out and buy a whole set, put the rest in the chest and use just the one they want. And they don’t put it back, so the next person goes out and buys a whole set again. So we end up having tons of extra stuff, but not many of the things we actually need. Finally someone did something about it, where they gathered all the tools from both testing trains and put them all in a big pile. They thought it would be better to just have the tools in the drawers in the chest, so they threw away all the individual set cases and put them all loose. They ran out of time, so they dumped all the individual tools back into the tool chest, resulting in a huge mess.

This was especially obvious when going through all the socket sets, which were all loose. After spending about 6 hours sorting them all into the same sizes (during which I discovered we had 13 7/16^th sockets), I finally put together some complete sets. We now have 29 full socket sets for drives ranging from ¼ to 1 inch, plus a whole bunch of extras. It was kindof fun though, seeing it go from a complete mess to nice and orderly.

Saturday afternoon I took off for a walk, hoping to see some new areas as I had already explored Sudbury once. I found a nice walkway by a stream, and followed that for a while, until I came to a street and could see a cool looking rocky hill. As I was no longer travelling by train, and could now stop and spend time wherever I wanted, I took off to see if I could climb it. I found another path that headed in the right direction, and then stopped at a pile of rocks,  so thinking I had found out how to get to them I ran on the rocks only to find that a large marsh area separated me from it. (I would have had some pretty sweet pictures about this place, but I cleaned out my memory card thinking I had transferred everything over, when I hadn’t. shoot). So I went further down the road till I found a small access road that lead to a path from which I could get to the rocks. I ran around on them for a couple hours, found some pretty sweet spots for some decently legit rock climbing (don’t worry mom, I was completely safe!). I also found some ponds of water that had frozen over that would have made some sweet spots to slide around on, but it couldn’t quite hold my weight. Angered by the denial of the fun that it would have been, I found a bunch of large rocks and threw them into the pond and made a bunch of holes in the ice. Hehe J. It was getting dark (it gets dark so early now! So much lost exploring time), so I headed back to the train. I stopped at a Japanese place for supper, and ordered some noodles which turned out to be very slippery. It was only after I had ordered that I noticed the folly of my decision, as there was no cutlery on the table, only chopsticks. Of course I wasn’t going to ask for cutlery, so I ate it all with chopsticks. I was quite proud of that. Went to see Wreck it Ralph that evening.

Sunday I had lunch with my aunt and uncle, and then did chores and laundry and shopping for the rest of the day. The plan for next week is to continue westwards through the rest of northern ontario to Brandon, Manitoba. The systems seem to work alright, hopefully it continues that way!

Job #3: The button

So there’s the jointbar computer, where I look at jointbars and see if they are in compliance or defect. Then there’s the geo station, where I look at the real-time data streaming in and verify defects if they are valid, or remove them if they are a spike in data. Now there’s the button job, which controls the DGRMS, a system that measures the lateral resistance of the rails by pushing outwards on it.

This is the setup:

The left column has the processors/amplifiers for the data streams. The top middle and right show the profile of the rail, middle middle has the realtime plotting, bottom middle has a bunch of info about the axle status. Second from top right has cameras pointed forward from either side of the train, third from top right has cameras pointed right at the axle, and bottom right shows the view from a camera mounted on top of the engine car. I mostly look at the camera mounted on the engine car, and whenever I see a switch or a large bridge I press the left button on the desk. That releases the horizontal pressure so the axle is no longer pushing outwards on the rail. Over switches it can derail the axle, which in turn can sometimes derail the whole car. When it’s past, I lift the button back up again. 

So in summary: bridge/switch coming, button down. Wait for it to pass, button up. And that's it.

There is a backup though, there are two sensors ahead of the axle that detect any metal. So when the crossover rail comes through the track, it picks that up, and if I haven’t pressed the button it automatically releases the pressure and sounds off an obnoxious alarm. The annoying thing is that it sometimes goes off other times, sometimes in road crossings where metal plates are used, and sometimes just randomly.

The hard part is that you have to constantly be paying attention and looking at a screen. You have about a 3 or 4 second window before what was previously not visible passes under the train and is no longer visible again. Apparently a lot of people have trouble doing it, and can only last 20 or 30 minutes before they go crazy, but I seem to be able to do multiple hours on it. It’s not a very brain-intensive activity, so I can think and talk to God and look at the scenery all I want. I can't go hang out on the side of the train anymore, but now I know when cool scenery is coming, so I know when to look out the window. It does mean not many pictures though, but as this is my third time through the area, i'm okay with that. I’m also taking videos of the screen, and hopefully by the end I’ll be able to put together a video from the perspective of the front of the train travelling all the way across Canada. Should be pretty cool!

Leftover Maintenance

Short story: left montreal, still more problems with the computer measuring a half inch wider than what was actually there, the data streams failing completely, and hydraulic pump controls not working. Spent 2 days in Toronto fixing it, finally seems to be working alright now, and are in Sudbury for the weekend.

Longer story: After the customary wake-up-at-5:30-don’t-leave-till-9 in montreal, we were finally moving again! Something wasn’t quite right though, there were a lot more defects than there should have been, considering they had just replaced all the ties earlier that year. We stopped the car and physically measured the distance, and found that the car was measuring a half inch larger than what it was actually was, meaning a lot of the defects weren’t valid. And after about 40 miles, the GRMS (Guage Restraint Measuring System, measures the lateral stiffness of the rails) data stream failed completely. We stopped the car, rebooted everything, and it lasted 1.5 miles before failing again. We stopped again, rebooted, and it lasted about ¾ of a mile. We ran the rest of the way to Toronto without the GRMS running, and did some troubleshooting that evening until 10. 

Tuesday we spent all day troubleshooting, I got sent to bed at 12:30am, but the supervisor stayed up until 4am trying to get it to work. The failing data seemed to be speed correlated, that the faster we were going the more data was being processed and it overloaded the processors until it failed completely. But there was also noise in the network. So we bought new network hubs and moved some stuff around, and it seemed to work up to 55mph. Then the hydraulic pump controls weren’t working properly, so a whole lot more troubleshooting to fix that up. We continued testing on Wednesday, but it was still measuring half an inch wider. We took apart the cameras to see if they had been shaken loose, and by the time we had them back together we didn’t have enough time with the current crew to make it to Mactier, the next station, so we turned around and went back to Toronto. We re-calibrated the cameras from scratch, and discovered that whoever had done the calibration previously hadn’t done it correctly, which would explain the half-inch of measurement difference. There wasn’t much else to do except run and see how it turned out, so we went to bed for the first time that week before 11:00pm. 

Thursday we ran to Sudbury, and aside from the data flatlining occasionally, it recovered as it should and continued working. We couldn’t really continue any further, as we needed to be in a larger town to get groceries and any other supplies needed, so we stopped there for the weekend. 

Maintenance in Montreal part 2

Doing maintenance isn’t quite as glamorous as travelling across the country by train, so the short story of the last couple weeks is that the DGRMS, a system which pushes a set of wheels laterally against the rail, was out for maintenance. It came back with more problems than it left with, a support bar broken off, grease lines not connected, vertical displacement measurements outputting wrong signals, software update bugs, etc. After lots of work (18 days) in montreal, we finally did a shakedown, where we go for a trip and test the software, and it all works. So we are leaving on Monday, heading west, and if there are no more problems we should be going all the way to Vancouver, which means a trip through the rockies!!

The longer story: (continued from the previous blog entry)

After finally getting a day off on Sunday (oct 28^th), we got back to work on the train on Monday. We got kicked out of the shop late on Tuesday, so we parked nearby and powered up the generators, and the GRMS moved as it should. Unfortunately, some of the sensors weren’t displaying proper readings. I worked for 4 hours to connect a 6-pin cord to its appropriate plug, which was located in a spot where you could fit either a mirror, or a flashlight, or a hand, but not all three at the same time. Once it was finally connected, we moved the axle around to see what the readings were, and the vertical displacements were completely wrong. After significant troubleshooting and finally calling the manufacturer of the hydraulic cylinders, we discovered that for some reason unknown to everyone, a different sort of displacement transducer was used, and the signal output was no longer being transformed properly. As replacing the cylinder would have taken about a week, and re-wiring and writing a new transformation software would also take about a week, we decided to order separate vertical displacement measurements and attach them on the side of the DGRMS, as was done previously.

This was decided Thursday, and during the afternoon I found out that it was cheaper to fly me home to Waterloo over the long weekend (CP takes remembrance day off) than pay for hotel/meals. The flight was 550, and the hotel was 150 a night, which that just by itself was cheaper. So I booked a flight for Friday morning to Toronto, and bused up to waterloo. Hung out at grebel for a bit, went rock climbing with my brother and some people from church, went to a worship service with a good friend, played an awesome game of ultimate (during which I found out that sitting for 2 months really takes a toll on your fitness),  and hung out with family. Left late Monday, and got back to work on Tuesday.

The 2-inch support rod that was broken off in transit had finally arrived, so that was installed Tuesday morning. We were still waiting for the vertical displacement measurement devices, so we finished up smaller tasks, tied up all the grease lines, replaced some light bulbs, refilled water, and tried to keep busy. That afternoon a shipment arrived from the manufacturer of the cylinders, and the contained transformers for the vertical displacement! We connected it to the left cylinder, and the readings showed correct values! That was a great turn of events. So we started making a box to secure the transformers to the car. Everything we do has to be tied down and connected as securely as possible, as the train shakes around all day long. For the rest of the day, and Wednesday, we updated the joint bar detection software. After noticing a lot of bugs and getting multiple updates, we got a crew late Wednesday to run us around a bit. We put pieces of tape on some joint bars, numbered them 1 to 25, and ran over them a bunch of times. The software took a picture of every single one, which was a large improvement over the previous system, which would miss some joints.

Thursday we hooked up the vertical displacement cylinders and prepared for a final calibration, only to discover that the right cylinder wasn’t working. After troubleshooting all we could, we determined that the only possible explanation was that the transducer inside the cylinder itself was malfunctioning. After a couple calls to the higher-ups, we decided that we could run on just one measuring vertical displacement, as the chance of only one wheel derailing is pretty slim. We then calibrated the whole system, and the numbers were close to what it was originally set as, which was good news. Friday was finally a shakedown, we got a crew to take us to a 20 mile stretch of main track, and we tried forward and backwards, increasing and decreasing mileposts, and checked every possible scenario of what we would be doing while testing. After fixing a couple bugs, the system finally works well. We took a break for lunch to eat out at a restaurant, and noticed a significant number of people walking around. We realized that it was 4:30pm, and that that was the time that regular people end work. And yet we were going out for lunch after starting at 7:00am. But the system finally works!

We had done a lot of work that week, so all day Saturday was spent gloriously doing nothing, mostly lying in my bed watching a movie or a Barcelona game on my computer. I ventured outside for lunch, and stumbled across a santa clause parade, which I watched for a while. Sunday morning was also resting, and in the afternoon Anthony and I went shopping and cleaned up the train. The fridge was pretty empty, and the total grocery bill was close to $1500 (we did several trips).

The plan now is leaving Monday heading west, and if everything goes well and there are no breakdowns or more maintenance, then we should make it all the way to Vancouver, which means a trip through the rockies!! It’s been nice having someone clean up after me and make my bed each day (I’ve been staying in a hotel all this time), but I’m also really glad to be moving again. Looking forward to some new scenery!

Maintenance in Montreal

After travelling light all weekend we arrived in Montreal monday at midnight. Tuesday was cleaning up the car and moving everything from the old boxcar to the kitchen car to get ready for the transfer. Wednesday I helped Pat (the supervisor) with the end-of-year database stuff, and was inputting the data from time sheets from the previous three months, which took all day. Thursday and Friday we were testing the yard in montreal. And just like the previous yards we tested, we were up at 6 to get ready for a 7am start, only to start moving at 10ish. There was one time on Friday when Pat was making phone calls that I was in charge of the train – I told them when to go and set up the test files. I tested two tracks by myself that way. It was a pretty cool feeling.

Friday evening the new boxcar arrived, so we split up our train and with a bunch of delays moved the boxcar and the testing car into the shop. Saturday we took a look at the DGRMS system under the train.

It’s a set of wheels with a split axle that’s attached to a long hydraulically powered arm so it can move up and down as well as push out on the tracks. It was in for maintenance performed by ENSCO, the company that developed the system for us. They took a month longer than expected, and it was supposed to be all ready for us to use, just hook up and go. But a lot of grease lines and wires were not connected, and some of the sensing equipment needed to be completely replaced. But the main thing was that there was a 2-inch thick steel rod supporting the two large cylinders that wasn’t there anymore, and the supports of it were all bent out of place. It must have hit something high on the tracks and broken right off. And after a further look at the cylinders which were moving when they were supposed to be stiff, we took the covers off and found out that the impact had also sheared a bunch of bolts off and moved the large pin around. After a lot of calls and head-scratching we moved the cylinders back into place using a hydraulic ram and replaced the sheared bolts.

Meanwhile I was connecting the grease lines back on, and the designer seemed to go out of his way to put them in the most inaccessible places. Some of them were 8 or 10 inches down a hole barely large enough for a hand.  I had to go out and buy a set of wrenches with a head that could rotate 90 degrees to tighten them. I also helped mount the lasers and cameras and lights.  

Sunday I got off, which was the first free day I’ve had since oct 21^st, and likely won’t get another until this weekend, 19 days almost straight work. We didn’t work last weekend when we were traveling from medicine hat to Montreal, but I was stuck on the train with very little to do, so I didn’t really get out or was free to do whatever I wanted. And we’ve been working long days too, starting at 6 or 7, and often returning back to the hotel around 9 or 10 at night. So on Sunday I slept in until 12:45 (I needed it). Wandered around downtown Montreal in the afternoon, and went to an IMAX show called rocky mountain express, where they follow a steam engine through the rockies and look at the history of making the railroad through the mountains. It was a very good representation of what I see every day, the views from the train. I wasn’t blown away or impressed with the scenery they showed, it was more a small smile and ‘yup, that’s about what it’s like to travel by train’. And it struck me that my job is so awesome that it takes an award-winning IMAX movie to accurately portray what my daily life is like. That people pay money and take time to go and watch what I see every day from my office window. I’m pretty lucky J. If you want to know more what sort of views I see from the train, much better than what pictures can portray, I’d suggest checking it out if you can (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pFocxpM524).

Change of plans

We left winnipeg Monday morning, travelling through more of the prairies. It’s mostly flat, but not completely, there are some hilly areas. Our destination was Calgary for the weekend, where we were finally going to get the other boxcar. This boxcar contains the DGRMS (Deployable Gauge Restrain Measuring System), which drops a bar down that puts lateral pressure on the rails as we are moving, and by measuring the position before and after the stiffness can be calculated. It has been under repair this whole time, which is why we haven’t been doing it. We were originally supposed to get it in Sudbury, but there was still work to be done on it so it got postponed one week later, and then until Calgary. I was excited to go there, and was planning to go to Banff for the weekend and climb a mountain. I haven’t been to the Rockies in recent memory. My parents claim I was there once when I was small, but I don’t remember it so it doesn’t count.

Well, we found out on Wednesday that the boxcar isn’t moving as fast as they were hoping (it wasn’t in Calgary yet, but somewhere in the states) so instead we were going to finish our testing that week and then move as fast as possible to Montreal where we’d meet the boxcar and attach it there. I’m not completely sure why they changed it to Montreal, it’s kindof the opposite end of the country.

We were testing yards on Thursday and Friday, so we would go back and forth on every track in the yard and then travel to the next one. Both days we were scheduled to start at 7:00, so we were up at 6am, but didn’t get moving until 10am and 11:30am. Lots of waiting around. We finished Thursday at 3ish and parked in Medicine Hat, so I went out for a walk. Found a path on top of an escarpment type thing that had a pretty nice view of the town. Walked down another one and found a park/nature preserve, and walked around in there down some pretty nice snow-covered paths. Was walking around a corner and came across a deer less than 10 meters away that was just standing there and staring at me. I stood still and stared back and snapped a couple pictures before it started running off. Walked back to downtown and wandered around for a bit until it got dark and headed back to the train. 

After testing the yard on Friday we started heading back to Montreal, and pretty much ran non-stop, even through the night. We stopped sometimes for a crew change or for a train meet, but never for more than an hour. We finally arrived monday at midnight, which means about 82 hours of almost straight travel. I’m surprised at how well I slept, I thought I would hardly get any sleep with the train bouncing around all the time. I slept alright the first night, and only woke up a couple times the other nights.

There isn’t much to do on the train, we don’t get any satellite signal or internet, and it’s hard to do precise movements with a mouse, so a lot of computer games are out as well. I’ve found that reading bothers me when the book is jumping around all the time, and it’s hard to focus on the small letters. There are a fair amount of movies on the train which I’ve watched quite a few of now. There’s also standing between the cars and looking at the scenery, but it’s a lot colder now, especially with a 50mph wind chill (it’s been below zero a fair amount, there’s snow in pretty much the rest of Canada except for southern Ontario).  I’m also working on making a monopoly game using excel and macros and userforms. It’s a lot of fun, I like programming. I’ve already made one that can solve easy sudokus, and one that can create and solve mazes of any size. It gets frustrating when I’m trying to put my cursor somewhere to edit and it’s jumping around all over the place, so I have to use the keyboard as much as possible. (Note: not all train travel is this bad, it’s probably really smooth. Our car is a converted boxcar that’s almost 50 years old, so there is minimal suspension)

I really have no clue what the plan is for the rest of the week, and I’ve given up trying to figure out what the master plan is, as it has changed over 5 times while I’ve been here. We are supposed to be getting the boxcar late this week, and after we’ve done some basic maintenance and moved stuff from the old boxcar I’ll be in a hotel in Montreal until the boxcar comes. Even then I’m unsure of exactly what my role will be, as I don’t know very much / nothing at all about the new system.

I just hope we still get to go through the rockies, but from what I understand there’s a chance it might not happen. Dang. Guess I shouldn’t complain too much though, I still got to travel over most of Canada by train J

Winnipeg (and bridges!)

After dropping George off at airport for his flight home we went to hotel. Our rooms were on the 18th (top) floor with a balcony and a pretty sweet view. On the elevator ride I saw some pictures of a pretty cool looking cable-stayed bridge, and right away knew that that would be the first thing to visit. Went to an indian buffet restaurant with anthony, and came out completely stuffed with some pretty excellent food. Went back to the hotel, got my camera and took off to find the bridge. And it was totally worth it - an impressive cable stayed bridge that also had a restaurant hanging off one side, all balanced precariously on a single pier. Went on a 2 hour photoshoot of the bridge, walking all around it and up and down both banks on both sides. I probably get too into bridges, but they're so cool!!

While I was trying to see the bridge from all angles I also found some other cool things - a graveyard, cool waterfront areas, and some other bridges :). The big white thing at the end of the one on the left is a huge chunk of concrete used as a counterbalance to raise up the bridge to let ships pass. I thought it was a large sign from the distance until I walked under it and saw that it was a couple meters thick. I had a much larger appreciation of the small steel columns holding it in place after that. Oh, there was also the future museum of civil rights in that area, which is a pretty impressive structure. The engineer who designed the glass structure/cladding used to work for MTE, an engineering firm in waterloo that my dad works for, and with whom I spent a co-op term working for.

Decided it was getting pretty late, and we had to be back at the train at 9:00 Saturday morning cause a fuel truck was coming to fill up the tank for the generators. So I started heading back to the hotel, and eventually came to a large intersection that had no pedestrian crossings. I didn’t want to turn around, and saw a stairway going down with a sign that said ‘pedestrian underpass’. So I headed down, and turns out it was the beginning of an extensive network of tunnels and bridges (Even more bridges! Hurrah!) between buildings that allowed for travelling through most of downtown all while staying indoors! It was probably a couple kilometers in length in total. It meandered through an underground shopping mall with food courts and offices and boutiques, then went up a couple stairs and passed through more office buildings and malls and shops with bridges over streets between the buildings. Was walking along the second level of a mall when suddenly there was a big ‘whoosh’, and a jet of water blasted up beside me through an opening in the floor up past the third floor, then fall down again. Pretty cool! And the best thing about this place was that it connected to the hotel I was staying in.

Decided again that it was getting pretty late (close to midnight at this point), so I headed back to the hotel. But then I found a grand piano sitting right by the elevators to go up to my room, so I stopped and played until someone came by and said I should move on. After that I finally went to my room.

Saturday morning there was supposed to be a fuel truck for the generators between 9 and 10 at the train, and they were supposed to call and give me a 30 min warning. Anthony and I decided to go to the train for 9 and do chores until he showed up, and good thing we did cause we were almost at the train at 8:50 when I got a call from him that he was trying to find the train. So much for a 30 min warning. After he filled up the fuel we went to the casino that was right by the train yard. Our plan was to go to the roulette table, bet $20, and then walk out. He put it all on the middle third, I put all on the last third but decided last second to move $5 to the first third so we had them all covered. Too bad I did, cause it landed on the last third. I still walked out with $45, a 225% return. Not bad for my first time in a casino. We went out for lunch, then I went to the Manitoba museum. I had been to a couple museums at this point, and was starting to think that most were pretty similar – some stuffed animals, pretty rocks, arrowheads, broken pottery, etc. But I was very pleasantly surprised at this one. There were lots of exhibits about the tundra, which was completely new for me. Also a fair amount about the railroad, which was cool to see how important it was for the economy of an entire province. Most impressively there was a full sized ship complete with mast and sails and rigging. They also had an exhibit where the floors and ceiling and walls were all made out of mirrors, and it was really cool and disorientating.

After going through that museum I decided that going to Churchill is pretty high on my bucket list – tundra, polar bears, the arctic ocean, and northern lights. Walked around some more, visited the cable stayed bridge again, and went back to the hotel.

I set my alarm for 9:00 Sunday morning, but the stupid thing didn’t work and I woke up at 11 instead, which meant my whole morning was wasted as I had chores to do in the afternoon. We did our shopping and cleaning up and finished around 5ish. It was still light outside, so we decided that I would take the rental car, go explore where I wanted to, and return it when I was done and take a taxi back. I went back to the bridge area and walked around the market and walkways and paths that were in the area. It was getting dark, so I went back to the bridge and said goodbye, dropped off the rental car and went back to the train.

Transitions

We were back on CP lines this week, which means we were running the joint bar picture station again. But with two of us, it’s not that much work. We left Sudbury on Monday and travelled to Chapleau, where we ran into some trouble. There’s a lot of water running through pipes to cool the train engine, and if it gets cold it could freeze and bust the pipes. So there’s a plug that if the temperature gets close to freezing it will pop off and dump all the water out. That happened Monday night, and we lost all the water in the engine, so the engine wouldn’t start. There’s supposed to be a smart start that starts the engine up if it gets cold, but I guess it wasn’t working. They noticed it in the morning, and one of the guys saw some oil and though there might be an oil leak, so they weren’t allowed to move the engine at all, even if they brought another engine to push it out of the way. So we spent the day stuck in Chapleau with no internet or tv. I had gone for a run the night before, and pretty much saw all of Chapleau – it’s a pretty small northern Ontario town. They found out during the day that there wasn’t an oil leak, so we kept going on Wednesday. 

Trains don’t like changes in elevation, as that requires a lot more fuel and energy. They like to stay as flat as possible, and water also likes to stay as flat as possible, so we’re usually travelling beside water. And when there’s a huge lake nearby, like Lake Superior, we travel along it for quite a fair ways. Some of the area is pretty hilly, resulting in the train track clinging to the side of these hills, with a rocky cliff on one side and a steep rocky slope down to the water on the other side. I had always taken it for granted that the train stays on the rails, but on this track with such a steep slope on either side and no guardrails of any kind at all, I realized how precarious those two thin strips of steel seem. The wheels did their job though, and we passed through the spectacular scenery safely.

I really wanted to go climb one of those hills though… it looked like it would be a lot of fun plus a good view. I think I’m going to start a list of places I should come back and visit again and spend more time. So far it would be here and moosonee. And northern Ontario in general, but I’m for sure returning there this spring to do some white water kayaking, which will be awesome.  

Saw a fair amount of wildlife this week. Finally saw a beaver after seeing countless beaver huts. Also saw deer three times – first time they were running through a yard, but they disappeared into the bush just as I was able to snap a picture. The second time I just caught them running away. But the third time there was a bunch of them in a field with nowhere to hide while I snapped a picture.

We crossed over into Manitoba, but was still seeing hills and rocks, we were still in the Canadian shield. It flattened out a bit into some large marshes, then got rocky again, and then within a couple miles it got really flat. I was surprised how quick the transition was. I’m finding it a lot less interesting to look out the window, you look once and you’ve seen everything you’ll see for the next 10 miles. Before there were trees and each curve had mysteries and unknowns behind it, and at any point the trees could open up into a picturesque river or lake or marsh. Here I know what’s coming well ahead of time. Oh, and there aren’t any curves anymore. It’s straight for miles.

We’ll see if it gets better this week, we’re going from Winnipeg to Calgary. We are finally swapping boxcars to get the DGRMS (Deployable Guage Restraint Measuring System) which measures the lateral resistance of the rails. We have the whole week scheduled for maintenance, and I don’t know how long it will take or if we’ll get more free time. 

The end of the World

The end of the world... That`s what Don calls moosenee, located on the tip of James Bay. He said that if we get off the train we have to tie a rope around our waist in case we fall off, and that if we look down we can see Australia and China.

Seriously though, it is pretty remote. the only way to get there is by train or airplane, so any cars they want to drive around have to be brought up by rail. 

We started in North Bay, went up through Englehart and Cochrane with a small trip into Quebec, over to Hearst, back and then up to Moosenee. It`s different scenery up there, the Canadian shield ended, and trees became shorter and stunted, but they still looked old. I`d never been to the tundra before, so this was all new for me. On the track up to Moosenee there were some power lines for a bit, but for the most part we would go 30 or 40 miles without seeing any signs of civilization at all. 

We went by spots where all the trees were very short, and you could see overtop of them for a fair ways. We stopped for the night at 9 or 10 at night, and started again at 6 or 7 in the morning, so I never really had a chance to get out and walk around any of the towns we were in. There was also snow on the trees on the way back, which made for some nice scenery. We also passed a fair number of abandoned buildings, which I really wanted to get out and explore them. But the train always travels on…

Due to some confusion and switching between rail companies, it didn’t look like we were going to get to Sudbury for the weekend, which was the plan. But somehow it came together, and we pulled into Sudbury on Saturday at 6:00am. After doing chores I got a chance to walk around a bit, although it was raining and cold. Found a really nice walkway with large rock outcroppings along a lake, which also conveniently lead to Science North.

I got to hold a tarantula and have him walk over my hands (they’re surprisingly light), pet a skunk and a beaver. The beaver had really soft fur, despite looking really bristly. 

Wandered around a bit more, climbed some of the larger rocky outcrops in the town that had some pretty nice views from the town. Was graciously hosted by my aunt and uncle who live just outside of Sudbury, attended their church on Sunday, went grocery shopping, and that was pretty much it for the weekend. We're heading west next week, and scheduled to spend the weekend in Winnipeg. Hopefully I'll have more time to visit next weekend, this one felt like there wasn't much time available.