Question - while playing with Google Maps - and looking at Great Lakes Shipping in Thunder Bay, ON, came across a group of passenger cars - in a field. Blue roofs - any ideas? Waiting to be scrapped? https://www.google.com/maps/place/Thunder+Bay,+ON,+Canada/@48.402702,-89.2224077,117a,35y,39.45t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x4d5921774c16e98d:0x3d0557348f1d8b74!8m2!3d48.3808951!4d-89.2476823
Thanks
Bob
I don’t know, but sitting on the ground without trucks and with no rails leading to that storage area it would seem to me they’ve got a date with the scrapper.
Maybe someone in the know will sound off on this.
I don’t know about these particular cars; however, I believe Hawker Siddeley (sp) had a plant there at one time. Perhps these might be from an order that never was completed before the plant closed. That was, IIRC, some time ago. An uneducated guess at best.
Charlie
That is the Bombardier Plant in Thunder Bay which is very much alive and producing streetcars for the Toronto Transit Commision (TTC).
Those would be shells. They are behind on their order and frantically trying to catch up.
Bombardier continues to ramp up production on its ongoing streetcar contract with the Toronto Transit Commission, but there’s still a lot of ground to make up, according to the president of the union local representing Thunder Bay workers.
Bombardier and the TTC signed the deal in 2009. Under the contract, Bombardier is to build and deliver 204 new streetcars for use in Toronto by 2019.
Those cars are being built at Bombardier’s Thunder Bay plant using components produced by the company’s facilities elsewhere in Canada and Mexico. While the production process is improving, the union said, the project is still fraught with delays.
Miningman, are you sure about that? Those shells look awful big for streetcars, although there’s nothing alongside of them to give any sense of scale, and at any rate they don’t look like the streetcars pictured.
I hope you’re right though, those carbodies look too nice to join the fraternity of Phi Kappa Scrappa.
Well it’s a Bombardier plant and it is very active…who knows what items are stored outside…the TTC could have traded in older cars or perhaps it’s for a different order.
The point is the plant is very much in business and producing.
It was the former Canadian Car and Foundry Plant and goes back a long long ways.
I believe these are the so-called Renaisance cars, acquired by Via Rail from the MetroCammell, UK. According to a WIKI article, 29 of the sleeping cars are stored in Thunder Bay.
Canadian Car and Foundry? There must be a hell of a lot of history in there. If those walls could talk…
Firelock—Yeah no kidding. The plant is listed as a National Historic Site, even though it is operating. Built 1909-1912.
During WWII that is where they built the Hawker Hurricanes for the CAF and RAF and the Curtis Helldivers for the US Navy.
There are many existing elements of the WWII era still at the plant which is why it is listed as a National Historic Site.
Not to mention all the rolling stock and passenger equipment that came out of there.
No question about it…
Those are the VIA “Renaissance” cars.
They were built for use between the UK and Europe as “Nightstar” sleeping car trains and were purchased by VIA for service in Eastern Canada.
These might be cars never used by VIA (I don’t know which ones they used) or they might have been taken out of service for upgrading or just storage.
The left three cars in the front row are dining cars (where the light blue swaps from bottom to to top mid car). The others are all sleeping cars, with the dark blue upper body.
Peter
When VIA recieved the Renaissance fleet, they ended up with a bunch of sleeper shells that were uncompleted by Metro-Cammell, and while several ended up as baggage and dining cars, 29 remain unfinished in Thunder Bay. It is unlikely that anything will ever be done about them as VIA has been repeatedly sued over disability access to the cars, which due to the general smallness of the design is expensive and difficult to resolve.
Yes; having ridden in “Renaissance” sleeping cars, I can say that they are not well suited for transporting people who need wheel chairs to get around. It’s going on nine years since I rode the Ocean (and I then had no difficulty in getting around), but I would not want to ride in a “Renaissance” car again.
The Amtrak sleepers do have allowance made for passengers who use wheelchairs or walkers.
My wife and I rode in one of the cars that was used in VIA I service, and it was little different from domestically built cars.
There are 33 cars there and they arrived sometime between 5/7/2007 and 4/21/2010 (by looking at the Google Earth history views). And they do not seem to have been moved at all since then… but in the 6/6/2017 image they are all gone.
IF you go tho the OPs link then to street view you can see good closeups of the cars.
Looking at the linked photo, three of the sleeping cars on the right hand side of the group have had their vestibules removed.
This may have been to allow modification of the vestibules to better suit disabled access, for attachment to in-service vehicles.
I cant imagine removing vestibules as a process of scrapping while leaving the remaining sections of car behind.
Peter
Spare parts for the cars that are running?
^That would be my guess. They kept talking about scrapping the remaining shells, so if they’ve moved I think it is likely they are now scrapped.
Thanks all for the lively discussion. I think the explanation under the pic posted by SD70Dude http://railpictures.net/photo/609509/ provides the background. Never would have known about the Renaissance cars or the Nightstar service they were designed for. Bob
Miningman: posted earlier [in part]: “”…Many of the parts for the cars are being made in other Canadian Bombardier plants, as well as in Mexico. In fact, a group of workers from Mexico is in Thunder Bay this week, fixing issues with streetcar flooring made in a Mexican Bombardier plant.
“They have four or five people up here working on midnights … to repair that job,” Pasqualino said, adding that employees from Mexico have been to the northwestern Ontario plant before…"
Just to make an observation… From time to time there have been stories [tales?] The information seems to revolve around manufacturing companies that have moved part of their processes to Mexico, as part of a move to make complicated parts less expensive(?).
Those plans seem to ‘come a cropper’ when ‘trasnslations’ become an issue, and involve not only lanuages, but interpretations;‘measurements’ between systems of measure. ( ie:‘English’, ‘Customary’ ;as well as to Metric). [:-^]