Barrett, Minnesota — CPKC Elbow Lake Subdivision
Two cameras, one fixed and one PTZ, on a pure-freight prairie subdivision
Barrett, Minnesota — CPKC Elbow Lake Subdivision
CPKC — Elbow Lake Subdivision, milepost 152.61 · Barrett, Minnesota, United States
This operator has not granted Spotatrain permission to embed the feed, so we link to it instead.
Watch at Northern Transcon Railcams (on the Steel Highway Railcams channel)Streamed by Northern Transcon Railcams (on the Steel Highway Railcams channel)
Stream hosted by Northern Transcon Railcams (on the Steel Highway Railcams channel). Spotatrain links to the original feed and does not rebroadcast.
Two cameras watch milepost 152.61 of CPKC's Elbow Lake Subdivision at Barrett, on the Minnesota prairie — one fixed, one pan-tilt-zoom. The traffic here is freight, with no scheduled passenger service.
About this cam
Barrett is a small town on CPKC's Elbow Lake Subdivision in west-central Minnesota, and the operator pins the location exactly: milepost 152.61. Two separate live streams cover it — a fixed camera and a pan-tilt-zoom camera — so the same train can be watched two ways. The cameras are run by Northern Transcon Railcams, which broadcasts them on the Steel Highway Railcams channel. The installation is sponsored by The Prairie Wind Players Theatre in Barrett; the operator is explicit that the theatre sponsors the camera but is not responsible for the stream's content, and directs questions to Northern Transcon rather than to the sponsor. The operator also publishes a running log of trains seen by the Barrett camera as a shared spreadsheet, which is unusual and useful if you want to know what a typical day looks like before you sit down to watch.
What to watch for
This is freight-only territory — no scheduled passenger trains — so what you get is CPKC road freight on a former Soo Line prairie route, running between the Twin Cities and the Dakotas. Post-merger, the power is worth watching: CPKC, legacy Canadian Pacific and legacy Kansas City Southern units turn up in the same consists. The two cameras earn their keep together: the fixed one gives you a consistent frame for reading reporting marks, and the PTZ can follow a train through the crossing. The operator's public train log tells you what has actually been passing.