A Geologist went on the Railway

The Buenos Aires Al Pacifico (BAP) was one of my favourite railways in Argentina.  This was mostly because it rostered an almost exclusively Alco/MLW fleet of locomotives, with one of the major shops located in Mendoza where my company's exploration office was located.  The BAP was a broad gauge railway running between Buenos Aires to the interior of Argentina; to my knowledge it never made it to the Pacific but only as far as Mendoza.  A narrow gauge railway ran into Chile from Mendoza but it was out of service while I was there.   I was working in Argentina during 1995/96 in gold and copper/gold exploration between Uspallata in Mendoza State and Rodeo in San Juan State.  Uspallata is somewhat well known as many of the scenes in " Seven Years in Tibet " were filmed in the valley north of the town.  I wasn't in the area when Brad Pitt was there, but apparently he caused quite a stir in the small Argentinian town while he was filming.   I met an older South African geo

OVR and KPR trains meet in Vernon BC January 21, 2001 For a short, wonderful couple of years, central British Columbia was home to two exclusively MLW (Montreal Locomotive Works, licencee of Alco) railways - The Okanagan Valley Railway and the Kelowna Pacific Railway.  These shortlines took over the former CP and CN trackage in the Okanagan in the late 1990's.   For decades Canadian National operated their MLW fleet almost exclusively in eastern Canada with few of these locomotives sneaking west of Winnipeg.  When CN retired the majority of their MLW fleet around 1997 many units found their way into the rosters of shortline railways, often because they were cheap relative to GM locomotives as anything else.  Suddenly places that had rarely if ever seen an MLW were home to sizable fleets of M420, RS18 and other locomotives.   The KPR and OVR are a short 3 hour drive from the Lower Mainland (otherwise known as the Greater Vancouver area) so it became a major attraction for Alco-phile