The ladder goes up the side of CCPX 911 and the queue to climb it never really stopped. Bunker gear, then red HazMat coveralls, then a hi-vis vest and a hard hat. Everyone gets a turn at the top.
CCPX 911 is a DOT 111 general service tank car that will never carry product again. It has been converted into a classroom. The spec plate is still stencilled on the shell, the inspection dates are still painted beside it, and the fittings on top are the ones a responder would meet on a bad night.
That is the whole point of HazMat Days. CPKC runs it at the Ogden Campus in Calgary under TRANSCAER, and across 23 and 24 April 2026 it put 5 sessions of hands-on training in front of fire departments, emergency services, municipal agencies and contractors from across the region.
We were filming people who were working
The first decision I make on a job like this is where not to stand. Every station has a working face: an instructor talking a crew through a valve, a responder with gloved hands on a capping kit, a line of people moving up a ladder. Get inside that and we would have stopped the training to make a video about training.
So we worked the edges. Long lenses from outside the station, wides from the ballast where nobody needed to walk, and the aerial unit up only between sessions. We did not ask anyone to do anything twice for the camera.
It also means we shot what was actually happening rather than what we planned. The best frame of the 2 days was not on any shot list. It is 3 people in 3 different kinds of protective gear, backs to us, waiting their turn at the manway of a blue tank car covered in the logos of the companies whose product moves inside cars like it.
Trailers are where the detail is
The tank car gets the attention because it is 20 metres of blue steel sitting on rail. The transfer trailers are where the close-up work lives.
Inside, the walls are racked with valves, fittings and appliances, the same hardware that sits on a live car, at chest height, under fluorescent light, with no weather and no ballast underfoot. One of the officers on camera called them a mobile HazMat workshop on wheels, which is exactly what they look like when the doors are open and 6 people are crowded around a bench.
