CanDo Geeps. Plus a Movable Conveyor Along the JSSX

It's the first week of the month, and hopefully you noticed that I've put up a new photo at the top of the blog.  It's a view of a couple of 50 foot boxcars that have been spotted at the small warehouse on the JSSX.  The freight cars at this place get switched out quite often.

Sitting outside of the Lambton Diesel Specialties shop here in Sarnia is this great looking pair of freshly re-built and re-painted GP9R's for CanDo Rail Services, of Brandon, Manitoba.  These two came into the LDS Sarnia shop in CP colours late last fall.

Some pretty snappy looking graphics on these, I particularly like the red stripe on the fuel tanks as it's just something a little different.  Sorry 'bout the phragmites growing in the foreground that are obstructing the view a little bit, but it's the best photo I was able to get.

And, if anyone wanted to model a Geep or two such as these, here's a link to the appropriate Switch Line Decals set: https://switchlinedecals.com/cando-gp9-decal-set/

And about a half-mile or so to the west (to the right in the above photo) of the two CanDo engines, there's a spur that at least used to see occasional covered hoppers spotted for loading with fly ash.  The material is transferred from truck to rail by use of this movable conveyor (below).  I'm not sure how they get it out of the truck and onto the conveyor.

The conveyor's support frame is on small wheels, and can be moved parallel to the track and freight car in a long steel channel. With weeds and grass growing on either side of it, the channel can barely be seen near the left-hand end of the bottom frame of the conveyor.

I'm going to try to head back down to this spur to get a few pictures of the surroundings. In the meantime though, here's a couple of more shots of the conveyor.

I've thought of a spot on the JSSX that I could maybe model a smaller, but similar operation, so started looking around on the interwebs for conveyors that might pass for this sort of thing.  To make a long story short(er), I decided to take a crack at making/scratching one myself with whatever I might be able to find within arm's reach of the workbench.

Incomplete so far, and unpainted as well, this is what I've come up with.  Hopefully I'll have more on this next time.

I had brought the cab-over in the picture in for maintenance, as the driver (well, me really) had somehow managed to knock off one of the side-view mirrors.