OOC: This one is for you
@Andrew Boyd 🙂
Canadian National Railways
Established: March 27, 1915
Headquarters: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Employees: 84,954
Industries: Rail, road, seaborne and air freight transportation and logistics
Divisions:
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CN Rail
-- Illinois Central
-- Newfoundland Railway
-- Canadian Atlantic Railways [1]
-- New England Central [2]
-- Lehigh Valley [3]
-- Duluth, Winnipeg and Pacific
-- Bessemer and Lake Erie
-- Northwest Territory Transportation
-- White Pass and Yukon Route [4]
-- Jamaica Railway
-- Panama Canal Railways [5]
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CN Intermodal
-- Canadian Intermodal Terminals Company
-- Walker-Matthews Manufacturing (50% owner) [6]
-- Reimer Yellow Roadway (25% owner)
-- CN Roadfreight
-- Terra Transport (33% owner)
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CN Marine
-- Newfoundland Shipyards (20% owner)
-- Marine Atlantic
-- Marine Caribbean
-- American President Lines (40% owner) [7]
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CN Air Transport
-- Wardair Logistics (51% owner) [8]
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CN Infrastructure
-- Joubert, Kenneth and Murray Transport Construction
-- Montreal Locomotive Works (21% owner)
-- Canadian Bridge Company (50% owner)
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CN Communications
-- Allstream Communications (50% owner)
-- Canadian Microwave Communications
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CN Lands
-- Fairmont Hotels and Resorts (22.5% owner)
-- CN Tower and Attractions
-- Western Canada Landholdings
-- The Northern Company (22% owner)
-- Sir Henry Thornton Technical College
The second-largest of Canada's 'Crown Corporations', Canadian National Railways was born from a need to keep a number of disparate railways built during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries from failing, as well as manage the government-owned railroads that had, up until that point, been a source of considerable trouble for many communities and the politicians who were connected to them. From that inaucpicious World War I beginning grew one of the most-respected railroad companies in the world, a company known for the ability to serve customers across eleven Canadian provinces and all three of its territories, as well as twenty-nine U.S. states, with lines reaching from the Gulf of Mexico in Texas, Louisiana and Alabama to north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska, Nunavut and the Northwest Territores, as well as from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island, as well as its ships and airplanes being able to deliver cargo all over the world.
Much of that success, and the massive profits that go with it - CN hasn't failed to turn an annual profit since 1982 - comes from high-quality management and a history of innovation. It's in-house technical college has produced hundreds of thousands of skilled personnel, and virtually all CN leaders have come from backgrounds further down in the company, a reality that has given the company an impressive esprit de corps as well as a history of good relationships with its operating unions, and in modern times the company's self-sufficiency and effective transportation system has allowed it to become an indispensible part of Canada's economic landscape.
After the Canadian goverment merged together the government-owned Prince Edward Island, Intercolonial, National Transcontinental, Hudson Bay and Newfoundland Railways with the bankrupt Canadian Northern Railway in 1915, it was able to merge the Grand Trunk Railway into the system in 1919 (despite multiple rounds of lawsuits by stockholders, dismissed by Ottawa primarily owing to the GTR's long history of not living up to its commitments and preferring to pay dividends to English stockholders than meet its obligations to the Canadian Government) but struggled to gain a cohesive identity until the promotion of former Pennsylvania Railroad manager Sir Henry Thornton to the CNR's chairman's seat in 1922.
Thornton, who ran the CNR from 1922 until 1948, built the CNR into a massive, efficient system that served its communities very well, creating much of the ethos that has guided CNR ever since. The company gained a repute for engineering excellence and technical advancements and, in Sir Henry's words, "Doing the job right the first time." The company under Sir Thornton and his successor, Sir Anthony McConnville, developed many technical innovations, including the development of continuous welded rail and the use of concrete crossties instead of treated wooden ones, one of the first developments of cab signals for a mainline railroad, the development of a radio network that spanned the nation that would later become the genesis of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, building many hotels along the line, creating a special division for ever-better fare from railroad restaurants and dining cars and creating a huge fleet of luxurious passenger trains that became known as the 'Great Canadian Fleet'. Thornton's motive-power managers created the Transcona, Asenalven and Beausejour locomotive shops specifically to advance the development of steam locomotives and perpetually challenge the Montreal Locomotive Works and Canadian Locomotive Company to advance their knowledge and designs.
McConnville, who was a two-star General of the Canadian Army during World War II who organized much of the logistics that kept his country (and others) moving during the War, assumed CNR's leadership after Sir Thornton's death in 1948, and McConnville completed CNR's dieselization, as well as developing numerous new types of cars and loading systems, including the first 'skids' and 'railboxes' for less-than-carload shipping, piggyback and container operations and bulk cargo trains of all kinds. Under McConnville, CNR began expanding into the United States, and McConnville's successor, Sir Leonard Robitaille, massively expanded this, taking advantage of the shakeouts of the 1970s in the American railroad industry to allow CN to get into many new markets in the United States - New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Louisville - with that number expanding further in the 1980s to include cities as far south as Oakland and Salt Lake City. The completion of the Ontario North and James Bay Projects in the 1970s led to CN electrifying most of its main lines in Ontario and Quebec, and the building of additional electrical generating capacity in British Columbia and Atlantic Canada led to the same there in the 1980s, as well as the wires stretching far into the United States. In 1984, CN and CP both passed their passenger trains off to a new Crown Corporation, Via Rail Canada, which became a major player in its own right as a result of its growth - and that same year, Via began the construction of the St. Lawrence River High Speed Rail System, which began operations across its entire length from Detroit to Quebec City in 1995. (By 2000 Via's operations on the St. Lawrence River HSR and its feeder lines, as well as in Atlantic Canada, Alberta and British Columbia were making them substantial profits.)
After reaching far into the states in the 1980s, CN completed the lines to the iron mines of Nunavut's Melville Peninsula in the 1990s, as well as the pathways that allowed commerce to much more easily make its way to the impoverished (at the time) Northern communities, while the telecommunications division became a major profit maker in the 1980s and 1990s. Line construction and acquisition in the 1980s and 1990s brought the company heavily into the auto industry and resulted in the company carrying vast loads of goods it hadn't before, such as bauxite, bituminous coal, crude oil, ethanol and anthracite. CN began to rebuild its cabooses with air compressors controlled from the trains' head end in the late 1980s, with remote-controlled mid-train helpers following in the early 1990s. After a particularly ugly incident at Dundas, Ontario in April 1989 caused by a runaway that resulted in broken-open tank cars spilling contents into Lake Ontario, CN began using a fourth man on longer and heavier trains carrying hazardous materials in late 1989, setting a standard that other North American railroads followed in the 1990s. Ever-more-powerful diesel and electric locomotives from all of the major builders in the 1990s made heavier trains possible, and CN's heavily-built main lines, designed and constructed that way during the times of Sir Thornton, had few difficulties handling it.
After a rocky early 1990s as a result of the turbulent leadership of Paul Tellier (who became CN's president in February 1992 but passed the leadership off to Alexandra Miller in August 1997), Tellier was followed by new President Alexandra Miller and technical wunderkid Jason Pateros, who joined Tellier's CFO Michael Sabia in being the "Aces Trio" that led CN until Sabia's retirement in 2015. During that time, CN made its largest acquisition ever in the Illinois Central in 2007, took over the Jamaica Railway from its province in 2000 and took over the operation of the Panama Canal Railway in 2002. The major acquisition spread the company's reach far beyond its original reach, but the company had by then also taken on such projects as the building of a new line from the end of the former Chicago Great Western all the way to Wyoming and the Powder River Basin coal fields and the rebuilding of the ex-Southern Pacific Siskiyou Line from Portland, Oregon, to Redding, California, which began operation for CN in its newly-rebuilt form in 1997, only to be extended south to Sacramento, California, in 2000 and Oakland, California, in 2005.
As of 2020, Canadian National Railways employs nearly 85,000, and retains the well-deserved reputation for technical innovation, centered around its Technical School in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and its white-collar Management School in Montreal, Quebec. CNR owns nearly 13,000 locomotives and nearly 250,000 freight cars, as well as its subsidiaries owning a sizable amount of their own rolling stock. CNR and Southern Pacific has been allies and friendly with each other for decades, with this most seen on the parallel main lines the two operate between Salem, Oregon, and Redding, California, where the two routinely send trains over each other's systems to clear bottlenecks.
[1] The name taken by the combined Prince Edward Island Railway, Cape Breton and Central Nova Scotia Railway and Dominion Atlantic Railway when the DAR was bought by CN from CPR in 1991 and the whole set was merged together in 1994
[2] The new name taken by the former Vermont Central after its new lines acquired by the company as part of the creation of Conrail
[3] Acquired by CN as part of the Conrail creation at the behest of the American government, which turned out to be an excellent investment
[4] The White Pass and Yukon Route follows the OTL route from Skagway to Whitehorse, where it was linked to CN's Alaska Main Line from Edmonton to Fairbanks upon its completion in 1959. The line was rebuilt as a standard gauge line during WWII, and the line was purchased out of bankruptcy by CN in 1982
[5] Owned by the Panama Canal Authority, operated by Canadian National
[6] Walker-Matthews was the company that came up with the revolutionary 'RailBox' systems for the carrying and handling of less-than-carload freight in the mid-1960s that, along with containers and piggyback traffic, made it much easier for railroads to attract new customers. The design was originally done for Southern Pacific and Santa Fe, but the ATSF's share in the business was sold to CN as part of the ill-fated merger between the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe that ended up being blocked by Washington
[7] American President Lines was purchased out of a bankruptcy court by Southern Pacific and Canadian National in 1992, with SP getting the larger piece owing to their larger investment. CN and SP have been frequent partners and allies since SP was placed in the ownership of its employees in 1982, a not-uncommon thing for a number of North American railroads
[8] When Wardair became part of Canadian Airlines in 1989, its air freight divisions were sold to CN, which sold 49% of it to DHL in 2002