The 50th Street Train

50th Street is the name of two arterial North-South Roads in Edmonton Alberta. Separated by the North Saskatchewan River, 50th Street (north) runs from the 'Ada Boulevard' neighborhood to the Yellowhead Highway (and further into north Edmonton residential areas).

South of the North Saskatchewan River, 50th street carries traffic from the River areas south through Millwoods to the neighbourhoods of Walker and Charlesworth. It then contines south as highway 814 to Beaumont and through Leduc county towards Wetaskiwin.

The crossing of the CP Rail lines at 82 Avenue between the Sherwood Park Freeway and 90th Avenue has a long history of irritiation for Edmonton Drivers.

The CPR Lambton Park Yard (Scotford) is a light freight marshalling yard on Morris Road that sits immediately east of 50th street at 82nd Avenue. Handling a significant amount of rail freight, the switching operations of the yard cause daily blockages to 4 lanes of traffic - often for periods over 10 minutes. Drivers in Edmonton's southeast are no doubt familiar with blockages creating traffic tie-ups to the south that often extend all the way to the Whitemud freeway several kilometers away.



In May of 2018, the City of Edmonton announced the plan to start moving forward to alter 50th Street and remove the 'trouble' area around the CP crossing. You can learn more about the project at the 50 Street Widening project - City of Edmonton City-run Projects and Plans site.

The Traincam

Mtek Digital is an Online Marketing company in Edmonton Alberta. Located just a few hundred meters from the 50th Street rail crossing, we - and many of our clients - are regularly impacted by train delays. We understand that it's part of the way things move around this amazing country, but that doesn't mean we love it.

Since our office is so close, the folks at the Poplar Business Centre were kind enough to allow us access to mount a high quality camera on the roof. This gave us the ability to monitor the crossing on a daily basis, and since we do 'web stuff' building IsThereATrain.com was no-brainer. We didn't however realize how tricky building detection algorithms would be, or how tricky building a stable platform for the camera would be! It's been a regular 'ongoing' project for nearly a month to get the system stable, and 'working' - though we're still tuning detection!

Next up will be a live status update feed on twitter, which will operate until construction of the additional lanes on 50th street begins, and the underpass starts development. At that time, we'll switch to a more 'construction livecam' sort of implementation - while trying to maintain notifications of road interruptions as possible.