On Wednesday July 7th I tagged along, with my fellow railfan Matt, on a trip up north to the Grand Falls - Edmundston area to catch some CN action. We spent about 12 hours in the area in the heat!! With the humidex at 40c, I'm sure we sweat off some pounds as we waited for trains.. lol.
Our first train of the day was 121. We chose the Violette Station Rd in New Denmark. There is a set of signals there at the west end of the Ennishore siding. Now for this trip I borrowed a camera from Matt to try some picture in picture videos. So my idea was set up one camera with a wide shot and use the other for different angles and close ups. Great idea in theory.. lol. I set up my wide shot for 121 on a small hill that is close to the crossing at the Violette Station Rd. You can actually see my camera set up in Matt's video of the train. And I stayed with my close up camera close to the crossing. Well we weren't quite sure where the train was when it came around the corner, so I had to do some running to get cameras rolling. Here's my video I put together from the two cameras.
Now after train rolled through we headed up to Edmundston. We wanted to catch 121 again after it leaves Edmundston. We went to a crossing we like in Saint Hiliaire, NB. We've shot here afew times before but it's a spot we enjoy. There is a signal and a hot box detector close to the crossing. I again used two cameras for different shots but this time I set up the cameras a little closer to each other. Here's the video..
Now onto 308. We heard that 308 would be meeting 305 at Saint Leonard so we headed for the siding. We walked in from the small crossing at CNR Rd. We setup near a spur track that goes to a mill. 308 took the siding and 305 stayed on the main but did not have green signal to proceed past the west siding switch. So they both came to a stop side by side. This wasn't making for very interesting video so we booted it for the car. We decided to catch 308 farther down the line because it was the second train of the day to have a DPU. I combined all my videos of the meet and the roll by of 308..
After that we called it a day with a three hour drive home. I think it went well for using two cameras. You can see a quality difference between the two cameras but I don't mind. It was my first try and there is always some tweaking to the videos that can be done to fix that but it can wait for my next try..
