Canadian Railroads > Mission City Meet for Monday - BC 1984

Apparently the road trip was interrupted by the radio siren song of CP 5842 switching the mid train remote helpers to the front of the unit grain train. An eastbound manifest happened by and was duly photographed, This road trip later toured a number of locations in Vancouver, it's been an interesting challenge searching through old maps and YT videos finding location names and noting the many changes in the area.

In the process I'm reading about the history of Mission City and that it is now referred to as the City of Mission and has a robust rail commute into Vancouver with facilities at this location.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission,_British_Columbia

- 1 At the time Canadian Pacific RR had a modern fleet of SD40-2 locomotives and continued to upgrade with technology such as Radio Control of mid-train helpers, in this case a radio equipped boxcar was MU-ed to the midtrain consist. The mid-train locomotives were probably brought to the front to enable unloading of the grain cars at a not too distant facility, probably along the water in Vancouver.

- 2 CP 5646 passing the Mission City Depot. Looking at modern overhead imagery this would be at the existing wye, the depot is gone but the apartment building in the background can be identified with the outside stairway into the building.

- 3 Caboose 434554 passing CP 5842 with signs of Ektachrome all around. Missed the nose to nose meet and almost flubbed the caboose passing the locomotive. At that time who would have thought SD40-2's and CP Vans would be so rare.

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At the time a list of trains was often posted outside of the Compnay station, usually with any Passenger Train arrival and departure info and sometimes with freight info of some sort. Often a quick visit to the Depot office would provide a line up of trains or some timely bit of info, perhaps an ETT or words of caution. In this case the board recorded the date and we moved on to the big city for more photos.

Thanks for looking.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/06/26 11:35 by TCnR.

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Very nice !
Gary 

Thanks for posting these Clive!  The depot burned in the late 90's, and CP gated off access to this area not long after.  Mission is a growing suburb community now, but most of the new development is up the hill and away from the part of town adjacent to the tracks.  The area where you took these photos is now frequented mostly by a rougher element of the population.