The Hudson Bay Railway in HO Scale

Since I started building the layout I have been expecting to use either the MBS (Manual Block System) or OCS (Occupancy Control System) method to control train movements.  My initial era (mid 1990’s) put it squarely into the OCS era.  I knew that CN used Time Table and Train Orders (TT&TO) until the early 1980’s but this was a bit of esoteric information for me when construction commenced.  Since then I have backdated to the 1980’s for my era, but I continued to expect to use OCS.     An email conversation with a friend caused me to stumble into something I hadn’t been thinking about: also changing my train dispatching system.  Part of the email conversation caused me to refer to the CN Lines website ( http://cnrha.ca ) to check something.  While there I happened across the CN employee timetables:  ( http://www.cnrha.ca/node/976/ ) that have been scanned by the good folks at CN Lines.  I thought it would be interesting to see what was there for northern Manitoba.  Troublesome timet

A little background on the prototype: The Hudson Bay Railway (HBR), owned by Omnitrax, took over Canadian National’s lines to Flin Flon (Flin Flon Subdivision), Lynn Lake, Thompson and Churchill Manitoba in 1997. These lines were built to access northern Manitoba’s mineral wealth and forest products. The Flin Flon Subdivision was completed in 1928, the line to the Port of Churchill in 1929, Lynn Lake in 1953 and Thompson in 1958. Another line to Snow Lake was built in 1960 and abandoned in the late 1980’s. Major traffic generators for the northern Manitoba lines include outbound concentrates and ingots from Flin Flon, Lynn Lake and Thompson, predominantly Copper, Zinc and Nickel. As well, inbound concentrates, mill and smelter supplies for the smelters and concentrators at these mining centers is shipped by rail; raw logs and chemicals going to, and finished wood and paper products coming from the Tolko lumber mill and pulp mill, frack sand from Channing, grain loads going to and grain

In April 2000 the HBR had a derailment between Flin Flon and Channing that required The Pas Auxilliary to be dispatched to clean up the derailment.  The auxilliary worked out of Channing which was south of the derailment.  

Introducing the Hudson Bay Railway in HO Scale This blog will focus on the modelling of the Hudson Bay Railway between The Pas and Flin Flon Manitoba in HO scale.  Along with the main area of interest, the lines to Lynn Lake, Snow Lake, Thompson and Churchill are also part of the overall layout as well.   The layout aims to represent the Canadian National operations circa 1981 to 1983 (with some variance from that time frame) as well as the more recent Omnitrax operations between 1997 and 2003.  There will be more posts on these subjects as time allows.   I hope this will provide some context to my ongoing modelling efforts.