Jumping on the bandwagon here....
NAME OF COMPANY: Canadian National Railways
GAUGE: standard gauge (4' 8.5")
PERIOD OPERATIONAL: 1915-present
MOTTO (optional): Serves All Canada (1924-1964), Advancement Through Transportation (1964-1993), How Tomorrow Moves (1993-present)
HISTORY/ DESCRIPTION: Born from the demands of Canada's rapid economic and social growth in the 20th Century, Canadian National Railways came about as a result of the years of mismanagement of the Canadian Government Railways systems (primarily the Intercolonial Railway of Canada, Prince Edward Island Railway, National Transcontinental Railway and the Hudson Bay Railway) and the financial weakness of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, which led to fears about the problems about the loss of vital transportation links, particularly along the routes of the Intercolonial and National Transcontinental. Knowing this and knowing the financial problems that afflicted the Canadian Northern Railway, Canadian National Railways was developed to make sure all of the vital routes kept operating. The company's high visibility during World War I (particularly the vast amounts of people and goods hauled to the vital port of Halifax during war and its efforts in rebuilding the city after the devastating explosion in December 1917) led to the firm having a positive profile.
After the Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk railroads went bankrupt in 1919, both were almost immediately integrated into Canadian National - despite this, stockholders of the Grand Trunk fought the matter in Canadian courts for over two years before coming to an agreement with Ottawa in 1922 that paved the way for the Grand Trunk to be integrated into Canadian National in 1922. CNR's initially very twisted system began to be organized for civilian purposes after the war, particularly after Sir Henry Thornton became the President of Canadian National in 1922.
Sir Henry Thornton, who would head the CNR until his death in 1948, would shape everything about the company, most of all its reputation for engineering excellence and, in his words, "Doing the job right the first time." CNR quickly evolved its disparate systems into one cohesive whole and made good on massive promises. CN invested heavily in the communities it served and advanced the interests of thousands of customers large and small, introduced more passenger-friendly travel and CN's 'Great Canadian Fleet' of passenger trains - including the
Super Continental,
Dominion,
Challenger,
Royal Pacific,
Wild Rose,
Ocean,
Trillium Special,
Cavalier,
Ambassador and
Northlander - and made sure all of them were equipped to receive transmissions from CN's transcontinental radio network, which became the genesis of the global Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. CNR's hotel chain fought a spirited competition with Canadian Pacific Hotels over who could build and operate the most luxurious hotels, creating several of Canada's incredible hotels, most famously the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa, the Jasper Park Lodge in the British Columbia Rockies and the Royal Vancouver Hotel in Vancouver. The company was a pioneer in the 1920s of electrification in the Rocky Mountains and the first (and only, as it turned out) user of Garratt-type locomotives in North America, and worked with the Pennsylvania Railroad in the United States to develop its cab signal system (a system used to this day), while in the 1930s introducing the use of welded rail and reinforced-concrete crossties, as well as integrating the Newfoundland Railway into the CN system after Newfoundland's entry into Confederation. CN's relationship with its labour unions was excellent and was largely copied by its rival, Canadian Pacific - indeed CPR, which had been the first to cross Canada by rail (in 1885) also operated similar to CN in many regards.
Sir Thornton made a point of training a number of people to follow in his footsteps, and his successor was one of these, Sir Anthony McConnville. McConnville, who had been one of the men responsible for Canada's military logistics during World War II, ran CN from his mentor's passing until he retired in 1967, completing the dieselization of the railroad in 1959 and advancing its many holdings. Diesel locomotives were followed by 'railboxes' for less-than-carload shipping, the development of trailer-on-flat-car and container operations, bulk trains and newer types of railroad freight cars. The company abandoned its airline subsidiaries in 1962 (creating Air Canada) and while company had abandoned coastal ship operations, its newer ships operated for global operations, including building four VLCC-class oil tankers in the late 1960s, the largest ships then ever built in Canada. Branch lines began to be trimmed back in favor of trucking operations in the 1960s, but CN expanded repeatedly into the United States, expanding its American operations as well as continuing its proud support for Canadian industrial interests. CN and CP merged their communications subsidiaries in 1966, moving from its telegraph and telex primary businesses into telephone service in the 1970s.
CN's expansion into the United States became a bigger deal in 1965 when the company purchased the dying Chicago Great Western railroad, making CN able to serve Chicago, Omaha and Kansas City for the first time, using Milwaukee Road trackage rights between Superior, WI and Minneapolis, MN - a route not ideal, but within a year and a half this didn't matter as CN, wanting to show what its operations were like to its new markets, began its 'American Highway' projects. The rebuilding of the Duluth, Winnipeg and Pacific, the 'Minnesota Gateway' main line and the rebuilding of the CGW became a big job even for CN's engineers, but it was completed to considerable fanfare, opening across the route in 1970 and making CPR, which had been in control of the Soo Line since the 19th century, very nervous indeed.
The situation got more notable in 1971 when the company purchased the Monon and Lehigh Valley railroads in the United States, giving the company a gateway to southern US markets and allowing the company to begin service to New York and Boston for the first time, kicking off a contest between CN and CP over American operations, which got turned up to titanic proportions in the mid-1970s. CNR ultimately bought over a thousand miles of ex-Pennsylvania Railroad, Reading Lines, Lehigh and New England and New Haven railroad routes and received trackage rights on the Northeast Corridor between Philadelphia and Richmond, Virginia as part of the formation of Conrail, adding another gateway. 1972 saw the Detroit, Toledo and Ironton became part of the CN system and grow the railroad's auto industry business (a very important one in Ontario and Quebec) and CPR bought out the failing Delaware and Hudson to get its own New York gateway, and both firms got into some huge situations - even so far as there to be a rumour that CN was going to make an attempt at buying the giant Burlington Northern, which had just come into existence in 1970. (This, obviously, wasn't true, but CN and BN were working on agreements at the time, which was likely the source of the rumours.) By this time, Ottawa, riding a wave of economic nationalism at the time, wasn't real pleased with CN's American focusing, but got CN and CP to agree in 1977 on the proposal to split up the dying Milwaukee Road, giving CN the Milwaukee's transcontinental line and many of its operations in Wisconsin and Michigan and giving CP lines in Iowa, South Dakota and southern Minnesota, giving CN a southern gateway to Vancouver (they had been struggling for this since the Grand Trunk Pacific days) and giving CPR a powerful market share in upper Midwest and a better Chicago gateway. The government hoped that would be that.
It wasn't.
CPR, whose involvement in Burlington Northern dated to when James J. Hill still ran them, was quickly able to work with BN, thus fixing CPR's problem of gateways on the West Coast of North America, but CN pulled a fast one on the CPR by giving Southern Pacific trackage rights through Seattle to Vancouver, which resulted in SP much more readily handling CN interchange traffic and, in a move that infuriated CPR, CN bought SP's Siskiyou Line from Portland, Oregon, and as part of the deal acquired trackage rights on SP to Oakland, California, allowing the company to access markets in California for the first time. This move initially angered Ottawa, but that anger was tempered when CN made it clear that the reasoning was to allow fruit exports to Asia through Vancouver and that the density of lumber traffic from British Columbia to California was so heavy that both lines were needed. CN proved right on this front - the California Main Line proved a gold mine for both railroads.
The 1980s saw CN management turn back towards Canada. The rebuilding of the Newfoundland Railway, completed in 1981, coincided with the arrival of three new diesel-powered ferries to the mainland - CN management was aiming to allow greater economic development in Newfoundland, and the new railroad allowed this, a situation made more important when oil exploration began in earnest off Newfoundland in the early 1980s and Canadian industrial interests developed several mines on the Island. CN and the governments of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island completed the construction of the Confederation Bridge between the two provinces in 1985, and the completion of the St. Lawrence River High-Speed Route in 1984 took passenger trains off of CN's freight lines in favor of the new lines. A new bridge between the ex-LV/NYO&W route at Cape Vincent, New York, and Kingston, Ontario, giving a direct Ottawa/Montreal-New York route, opened in 1986, and the building of the branch line from Quebec City to Port Cartier, a job started in the 1960s, was completed in 1987. CN's huge Transcona and Beausejour shops spent much of the decade rebuilding hundreds of examples of aging EMD GP9 and Alco-MLW RS11 locomotives that the company still needed and larger and heavier trains became the norm. After the infamous Hinton crash in February 1986, found to be the result of an incapacitated crew related to CN's employee practices, the company dramatically overhauled its scheduling system and set up dozens of bunkhouses and rest areas to improve both employee safety and morale. After another collision at Dundas, Ontario in April 1989 (made rather worse by a tank car being broken open and its contents spilling into Lake Ontario) is followed by Southern Pacific's infamous San Bernardino train crash in California, with both serious accidents found to the be result of runaways caused by incorrect weight readings on freight cars, CN announces the addition to trains of a fourth crew member, a loadmaster, on long-haul trains carrying hazardous materials or above a specified weight. The crew improvements and the addition of new cabooses with air compressors to allow better brake response result in a steady improvement in CN's safety record, and the company's profits returned to the government hit their highest number ever in 1992, when CN earns Ottawa $656 million in profits.
The arrivals of Paul Tellier and Michael Sabia at CN in 1992 proved rocky. Tellier and Sabia had gone to CN with the intent on preparing it for privatization, but this didn't prove to be easy. CPR and CN began talks in 1994 about merging the two railroads' operations in Eastern Canada, and Burlington Northern offered to buy large chunks of CN's network in Western Canada in April 1995. Both offers were rejected, but the Tellier era at CN wasn't going well. Tellier's attempts to do away with the loadmaster positions and conductors on trains without hazardous materials drew monstrous howls of protest from railroad unions, and the sacking of thousands of management staff made matters worse. The company's attempt to close to the Beausejour shops in Moncton and abandon the Prince Edward Island Railway both drew protests as well, and the union problems resulted in the first strikes by the railway's workers in nearly 50 years in June 1996. Despite all of the federal government proposed to privatize the railway in January 1997, but that ended quickly as Canada's business communities, well aware of CN's decades of support for them, returned the favor. The government pulled the legislation in May, and after an arbitrator settled disagreements related to the strike the year before in July, Tellier resigned from CN on July 27, 1997, and was replaced on August 1 by Alexandra Miller, who had been a director of AMT in Montreal before then and who many considered not up to the job.
They would prove to be more than a little mistaken. Miller convinced Sabia to remain on board as CFO and brought in 32-year-old wunderkid Jason Pateros on the advice of SP boss Robert Krebs. The Miller-Sabia-Pateros trio proved to be as competent as anybody before them, and while Miller handled strategic operations and Sabia finances Pateros restored CN's reputation for customer service and over the years to come restored CN's relationship with its workforce. The company bought from Conrail and New York Central a line between Geneva, New York and Philadelphia built the enormous Sir Henry Thornton bridge over the Niagara River to hook Buffalo to Fort Erie, Ontario, removing a system bottleneck, and completed bypass routes for Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Thunder Bay and Edmonton, while extending the CNR's Rocky Mountain's electrification all the way from Edmonton to Vancouver. Ex-New York Central routes from Columbus, Ohio to Charleston, West Virginia (bought after Petro-Canada began operations at its Detroit synthetic fuel plant in 2000) and from Lansing to Mackinaw City, Michigan (to fill in a hole in the CN network) aided operations, while the introduction of the 'Racetrack' trains for the very fastest of deliveries made it possible for markets thought lost to trains such as milk, fresh food and mail to begin coming back to the rails. The Transcona Shops in 2003 began the production of CN's 'armor-framed' tank cars (which came to be called 'steelbacks' by the crews) developed specifically for the carrying of flammable liquids and liquified gases, and after one too many incidents of double-stack container cars tossing a container (including an infamous accident where a CPR train in Whitby, Ontario, tossed a container as a train went over a road underpass, the container landing on car beneath it and killing the car's two occupants) CN modified thousands of its container cars with either bulkheads or side-arms to prevent lost containers.
CN's advancement into the United States proved a rather big source of profits as well. Having purchased the Siskiyou line from SP in 1977, CN's engineering crews had gone to work on it, and its final (for now) form began operations in 1997, electrified and using centralized traffic control and long (in some cases five kilometers or more) passing sidings, the rebuild of the line removed over four thousand degrees of curves, lowered the grade from 3.3% to 2.25%, built several new tunnels (including the 6.7-mile Summit Tunnel, which opened in 1996) and provided much heavier track, bridges and roadbed for heavier trains, and CN began to try to avoid SP's lines in California, building its own Sacramento Division from Redding to Sacramento, California, opening that line in 1995 and reducing the needed trackage rights to the stretch between Black Butte and Redding. The lines in the Midwest primarily focused on the lucrative Powder River Basin coalfields, which everyone in the area - CN, CP and BN being joined by Union Pacific, Rock Island and Chicago and Northwestern - was in on and yet despite that everyone was making money on it. CN completed the Milwaukee Road's electrification of its former Lines West out to McLaughlin, South Dakota and rebuilt the line for fast freight service, and while the Midwestern operations' initial paring down ended up creating a new rival in the Wisconsin Central (which began operations in 1982 and proved a capable competitor to both CN and CP in the region), the western lines to Chicago proved a highly profitable enterprise, so much so that the by then cash-flush CN started looking to expand further.
Mining operations in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, begun in the 1970s with diamond discoveries, had begun to get attention from the railroads in the 1980s, particularly after iron ore mining began on the Melville Peninsula in the 1980s in such quantities that it became much more practical to build a rail line from Churchill, Manitoba, north to the mines on the Melville Peninsula. After big iron ore deposits were planned for production in the mid-1980s, CN in 1985 began construction of what would become the Nunavut Division, a line built from Churchill, Manitoba, to Hall Beach, Nunavut, a line nearly 1800 kilometers in length though a part of the world known for harsh weather - a monumental task to say the least. While Tellier did make an attempt at stopping its construction (and was quickly smacked down by Ottawa on this front, as they had promised better transport to the Inuit of the Northwest Territories many years before), CN completed the line to more than a little fanfare in May 1999, just a month after Nunavut's separation from the Northwest Territories into its own territory. The line became more than a little useful over the following years, hauling vast loads of iron ore from the mines on the Melville Peninsula and the rest of Western Nunavut (and later gold, copper, molybdenum, zinc, nickel and uranium also moved by rail) and perhaps more importantly it massively lowered the costs of living for the dwellers of the Arctic - goods could be hauled to Hall Beach or Naujaat by rail and then shipped from there, instead of having to fly thousands of kilometres from Yellowknife or northern Quebec. The construction of operation of the line resulted in huge costs of living decreases in Nunavut, a situation added to when the Nunavut government's first huge project, the South Baffin Highway from Iqaluit to Cape Dorset, opened in 2007 - a move that saw CN begin container service to Naujaat, as ice-capable ships would carry containers from there to Cape Dorset where they would be trucked to Iqaluit, further improving transportation in a part of the world that desperately needed it.
Indeed, by the early 2000s CN was getting back its long-held pride as an advancer of Canadian interests and transportation technology. The RailFast program, meant to develop fast freight services on the St. Lawrence River High Speed Line and begin in 2004, proved a roaring success for the movement of courier packages and was expanded to race across the NYC/Amtrak-owned Empire Corridor between Toronto and Detroit and New York in 2006 and across Michigan and Indiana to allow service to Chicago in 2007, allowing mail, parcels and express cargo to travel at speeds of up to 280 km/h.
Ever more powerful diesel and electric locomotives combined with four-man crews, radio-controlled locomotives, cab signalling, GPS-based centralized traffic control and ever-stronger rails and roadbeds allowed for heavier loads than ever before to be moved safely. CN, on the advice of now-COO Pateros, in 2003 requested Unifor (which represented most CN train crews aside from the engineers, as well as hostlers and many maintenance staff) and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers to setup their own independent inspection teams and committees totally independent of CN management to act as watchdogs for safety and efficiency purposes. This shocked the industry but was approved of by the unions and absolutely loved by shippers, insurers and regulators, and the inspectors began their jobs on January 1, 2005. CN's safety efforts were soon copied by everyone else in North America, and the company's efforts made headlines across the industry.
But the biggest move of all was yet to come.
As CN's reputation was restored, its ever-excellent engineering departments and management staff restored the company's reputation with shippers and its own operating department. The ex-Milwaukee Road and Chicago Great Western main lines were gold mines, the Pacific Coast Main Line from Vancouver to Oakland proved both an operational success and a financial one (even when accounting for the huge costs of rebuilding the lines south of Portland, Oregon) and the eastern lines inherited from a stack of predecessors proved successful, making it easier than ever for Canadian businesses to ship to American customers across New England, the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest. Having earned huge kudos with Ottawa for the Nunavut Division and other lines into the Northwest Territories and the Yukon Territory and the success that was the Newfoundland Railway by the 2000s and with the unions on cloud nine, Miller and Sabia announced in 2006 CN's largest acquisition proposal ever, a proposal to purchase the Illinois Central, the 'Main Line of Mid-America', which would give the company its biggest expansion in its reach ever - the lines would run south and southeast from Chicago, extending CN's reach as far as Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta and Jacksonville and stretching the line through the Mississippi River Basin.
Once upon a time such a move would have elicited howls from Ottawa, but this time it was the opposite - Ottawa was positively gleeful about the prospect of its railroading monster expanding into the United States to such a degree. To the surprise of many, there was little issue from Washington about it - the Illinois Central had been in and out of financial troubles since the 1970s, and the prospect of CN's deep pockets reviving a sector of the country's transportation system that could use help had the Surface Transportation Board quite happy indeed. IC shareholders approved the CN takeover on June 11, 2007, and CN formally took over the Illinois Central on November 1, 2007. In something of an interesting twist, on January 1, 2008, CN passed off a sizable chunk of the IC's former Gulf, Mobile and Ohio main line to Southern Pacific, allowing SP to serve Chicago on its own rails for the first time.