Nostalgia & History > Canadian/Canadien National

I was, and still am, a rather dumb American at times. The first time I saw a freight car with Canadien National lettering on it's side, I thought it was a misspelling. (!?) I felt rather confused the next time I saw a whole CN train with lotsa Canadien/Canadian National lettering. Duh, one's French, one's English. (still shake my head at times about that) Any ways, I dug out some CN for your viewing pleasure. The CN used to operate many, many trains on the BN-BNSF through the Twin Cities. Several years ago they agreed to trackage rights on the WC, and soon after that, bought the WC. So good bye CN. Sure one may still catch CN action on their former WC lines, but it just ain't the same.

#1 DASH8-40CM 2403 is rolling north.

#2 SD40 5016. I sure loved the interesting details of CN's SD40s.

#3 The 5051 is fading.

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#1 Dash8-40CM 2408 is rolling south.

#2 Dash9-44CW 2554. They may not be painted as fancy as a ATSF Dash9, but these CN's looked cool with their tear drop windshields.

#3 The 5562. Is this a SD50F, or a SD60F? The photos of the 2554, and 5562 were both shot at CN's former DW&P Pokegama Yard near Superior, WI. I made sure to ask permission to take photos first. It was a fun place. Haven't been there in a long time.

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Even though I find CN to be a somewhat interesting railroad, they have the most butt-ugly paint scheme in North America. Even NS looks better, and NS wins the butt-ugly American paint scheme award IMHO.
Ron W

5400 series are SD50F's while the 5500's are SD60F's.

Liked the striped version, although it's a bit much on the longer frames. Not very artsey but very functional for the Western areas.
The bi-lingual lettering is kinda trick, one side English, the other side French. Check out the French spelling of the U.S. of A. Somethings just don't translate, they seem to have a committee that figures these things out. They design camels too.

Trains had a news item in an issue from the early sixties. Seems that someone had caught a spelling error on a boxcar in the new Visual Redesign scheme and notified the Atlanta newspaper. They sent a team out to photograph a young woman pointing out the 'misspelling' of Canadian. Guess they don't speak Canadian too well down south.


Edit: I think it was a boxcar of newsprint that was being unloaded at the papers' facility.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/23/16 07:17 by cnr6776.