Well, this happened last week...
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Finally made the pilgrimage to the National Museum of Transportation in St Louis to go find this diminutive CNR pacific. It was awesome to see unique and iconic rolling stock such as the Aerotrain, Bipolar, DD40x, BigBoy, Mohawk, GS6, FT Demonstrator units, Zephyr, freight and passenger cars of all types and so much more, but seeing my namesake was definitively the highlight.
When it was in service, 5529 was by no means a special locomotive. It was just another ancient lightweight hand me down from the Intercolonial Railway, that was then used on smaller branchlines in Quebec. The reason why this locomotive is significant to me is because it spent many years in charge of the local passenger train through my home town (right up until it was donated to the museum in St Louis in 1958). There is a great article called
The Shad Flyer and Other Trains by Lorne Perry, in issue 84 of Canadian Rail, which describes his ride on train 138 behind 5529, if anyone is interested.
https://www.exporail.org/can_rail/Canadian%20Rail_no084_1957.pdfHere she is in the early 50s coming off the Sorel subdivision, heading back to Montreal with train 137. (Picture from Dave Shaw Collection)
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Of course I took a boat load of pictures to help me finish off the N scale version I'm working on...
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While wandering around the museum grounds, I did find another unexpected familiar face way at the back of the car barn where 5529 is kept:
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The hockey mask screams Canadian Pacific, but the ghetto grill is 100% MBTA...
Thanks again to everyone who provided great suggestions for things to go see between Chicago and St Louis. We were on a fairly short time frame road trip to go visit some friends in St Louis, but I did manage to stop in at Des Plaines, McLean Depot, St Louis Union station and a few other cool spots along the way, and they sure didn't disappoint.
Now to go hunt down CNR 1551, a Sorel sub wayfreight regular. Off to Ohio we go!
