Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Pacific Great Eastern freight train, British Columbia, Canada, 1971


The Pacific Great Eastern Railway (PGE) was renamed the British Columbia Railway in 1972 and in 1984, BC Rail. It was a Class II regional railway and the third-largest in Canada, operating 2,320 km (1,440 miles) of mainline track. Its operations were owned by the public as a crown corporation from 1918 until 2004, when the provincial government leased operations for 990 years to Canadian National. The track and other assets, including a marine division and stevedoring subsidiary as well as large amounts of real estate, remain publicly owned.

The lead unit here is a RS-18 from the Montreal Locomotive Works of which 351 were built between December 1956 to August 1968; 29 were bought by PGE. It was the Canadian version of the ALCo RS-11, a Bo-Bo type with an ALCo 251B 4-stroke prime mover rated at 1,800 hp (1,340 kW).

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