Pine Street - Blue River, BC
Posted by: T0SHEA
N 52° 06.217 W 119° 18.088
11U E 342378 N 5775062
Anywhere along the length of Pine Street is a good Train Spotting location.
Waymark Code: WM118C9
Location: British Columbia, Canada
Date Posted: 09/05/2019
Views: 5
Without the railroad, there likely wouldn't be a Blue River. The town was established in 1912, just as the Canadian Northern Railway was being built through the North Thompson River Valley. Sometime around 1918 the railway was absorbed into the newly nationalized Canadian National Railway (CNR). The CNR tracks still run by the eastern edge of Blue River. This is the CN's southern mainline to the coast, terminating at Vancouver. Being a mainline, trains pass by at the rate of at least one per hour, hauling all manner of freight.
Some trains are "unit" trains, hauling a single specific freight, such as grain or potash from the prairies. The train shown here was a "piggyback" train, known to truckers as "The Pig". The only cars on the train are piggyback cars, each containing double-decked freight containers, today the preferred method of hauling pretty much everything that can be stuffed inside a 45 foot long container.