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Collectors' Item 4
by Omer Lavallee

    This month's subject is one of three specially built locomotives provided for the Montreal-Ottawa passenger service at the turn of the century. They were constructed at the DeLorimier Works in Montreal to the design of A.W. Horsey, under the direction of H.H. Vaughan. Mr. Horsey is shown standing beside No. 209, dwarfed by the engine's 84-inch driving wheels, largest ever employed on a Canadian Pacific locomotive.
    It was in 1898 that the Company completed the so-called "Short Line" between Montreal and Ottawa via Vankleek Hill; this brought it immediately into competition with the neighbouring and parallel Canada Atlantic Railway, an aggressive system owned by J.R. Booth, the Ottawa lumber king, whose "Canada Atlantic Express" linking Canada's metropolis and its capital, proudly claimed to have
 
been the first passenger train in this country with vestibuled passenger cars and electric lighting.
    Competition started in the autumn of 1899, after the Canada Atlantic had obtained three locomotives from the Baldwin Locomotive Works which, essentially, were duplicates of the CPR engines. By the summer of 1900, the CPR's fastest schedule was an Ottawa-Montreal morning one which performed the 113 miles in two hours, 20 minutes, including four intermediate stops. Such a schedule would require the locomotive to run daily at a speed well in excess of a mile a minute.
    These 4-4-2 "Atlantic" type locomotives used the Vauclain system of compound steam distribution, popular at the time. By this method, live steam, exhausted from high-pressure cylinders, would be re-used in a second set of low-pressure cylinders. Though fuel consumption diminished, the high maintenance costs necessitated by the more complicated mechanism mitigated against the system, and the locomotives were later changed, in 1910-12, to conventional "simple" engines. They were scrapped in 1917.
 
 
SPECIFICATIONS

 
 
Class
Numbers
 
 
Builder
Year
Serial Nos.
Cylinders (Dia x stroke)
Drivers (Dia)
Pressure (psi)
Weight (Lbs)


Compound

ST4 / F1a
209-211
950-952
1000-1002
DeLorimier
1899
1925-1297
13&23 x 26
84
210
275,250


Simple

F1b

950-952
2150-2152
DeLorimier
1899
1295-1297
20 x 26
84
200
276,000