My new job for a Canadian company has me spending a lot of time in Ottawa. On the downside, I’ve had enough time to figure out what items from among the breakfast buffet at the Kanata TownPlace Suites are genuinely worth eating (not many) and learned to subsist on their coffee-flavored warm water. I can live with weak-flavored coffee but weakly caffeinated coffee is an abomination. On the plus side, there are good places to eat in Ottawa (don’t let any Toronto snob tell you different: they just don’t know where to go) and there is also some variety in railfanning for me! Fun fact: there is next to zero freight rail traffic in Ottawa- the city gave itself over to having a primarily administrative economy long ago, and freight trains went with the industry. There are, however, VIA’s corridor spurs into town from Smiths Falls and out to Montreal and passenger train schedules make for easy train chasing. This is VIA #645, the weekday late-afternoon Toronto run, loading up at Fallowfield which is the suburban Ottawa station on the South side of town. But for the garish “VIA 40″-wrapped P42, this consist could be in a photo from the 1950s: its a solid rake of Budd ex-Canadian coaches. I want to say that these cars settled into corridor service after Toronto became their home base when VIA’s Eastern long-distance trains were re-equipped with the “renaissance” equipment shipped over from England. My last trip on a VIA corridor train, however, had renaissance coaches, so there’s really no rhyme or reason it seems.
