Photo 3 – Of course in the summer it was all fun. One venerable FP7A in classic colours, one green Ontario Northland baggage car and as many coaches as you could fill. 1502 often wore the white bear below the cab and powered the famous “Polar Bear Express” to Moosonee. On this day, my favourate little train has just arrived from the south and before lunch it will turn on the Y, settle in on the next track over and wait for the signal to head back home. As a reliable daily service, summer and winter, there were a good number of local people who made the trip on a regular basis.

The joy of modelling the Ontario Northland, for me anyway, was that this railway closely followed all my favourate CN and CP practices (bells, horns, antennas and winterization hatches for example) but still retained that unfamiliar ‘trains in the wilderness’ look and feel. A modeller could build a fine Canadian railway that few others had ever seen. I tried to copy this one in N scale many years ago. Sadly, nothing was available and I didn’t have the skill to create it myself.