East of Hearst, and near the village of Mattice, the Missinaibi River (Photo 2) offers up an obstacle all to familiar to the railway builders of Northern Ontario. If it wasn’t hard Canadian granite it was swampy, Black Fly infested pine forests and countless rivers. Railfans can only imagine the working conditions. Even today, along highway 11, it’s best to find trains sometime after the first heavy frost and before the dead of winter. 1389 and her friends were all born in 1960 so at the time this picture was taken they were a sweet sixteen and hard at work.

The long plate deck bridge is perhaps the easiest to model in any scale. It shows off the train to best advantage and when you add some nicely weathered concrete supports, and even classic water barrel; you can create a very impressive structure over a rather smallish creek. You’ll see here there’s plenty of greenery on the lower banks at this time of year but water stains on the cement show all the signs of a full tank in the spring and early summer.