Joel Dinda's photos with the keyword: canadian national

From the Nixon Road end. With lots of sky, and quite a bit of swamp.

Best LARGE , methinks; shows off my fancy camera, anyway. Canadian National Railway's Cory Yard, just south of Billwood Highway near Dimondale and Potterville, Michigan. This location's on my route to work; it's an easy walk from my office. Cory's not an exciting yard, operationally; all the sorting is done at the GM Delta Assembly Plant's loading facility, which is a couple hundred yards north from where I took this photo. This yard's purpose is to break long trains into shorter segments for GM's purposes, then to reassemble the train after the the cars have been filled with small vans. I presume the yard's named after CN Vice President Mike Cory , who was running their Michigan operations when construction of this facility began.

A southbound CN train (probably it's officially westbound) hurrying down Michigan's Grand Trunk mainline north of Potterville, Michigan. As you can see, there are signals on the tracks, for the trains--but the Windsor Highway crossing is a locally-rare unprotected crossing, so I wasn't really prepared when I and the train arrived more or less simultaneously. Lucky I got any pictures at all; rather pleased with this one.

This picture was shot a mile or so from my workplace. The train's creeping along on the long siding by Lake Interstate (an artifact of the construction of I-69, friends) and will halt before it gets to the crossing. Presumably there was a train coming the other way. I kinda like the blackbird atop the sign....

Soo Line couldn't be bothered to fully repaint the Milwaukee Road locos they acquired in their 1987 merger. So they just splashed black paint over the MILW identifiers and added their own. The result was ugly back then--nearly three decades ago, now--and it's still ugly. ( Here's a 1987 photo , with the "bandit" paintjob fresh.) As you can see, CP hasn't repainted this one, either. Downtown DeForest, Wisconsin.

I ducked by CN's Cory Yard this morning--it serves the large General Motors assembly plant in Delta Township, near Lansing--and found only this locomotive and a single car on the property. In contrast, the yard within the auto plant's boundaries seemed to be full. I suspect there's a problem with the exiled car.... Regardless, the loco's Illinois Central (IC) 9637, a GP38, of which there are plenty of photographs on the web in a variety of paint schemes. When Cory Yard was new we'd mostly see switchers wearing IC and GTW garb, but CN's apparently unified most everything since. I perhaps should mention Cory's not the world's most interesting rail yard--it serves one facility, and that plant does the sorting of the "goods" before the trains are loaded. It's next door to where I worked, and for me it's been an occasional subject since it was built.