Summer/Fall 2005
Canadian Pacific Railway Employee Communications
Room 500 401-9th Ave
S.W. Calgary AB T2P 4Z4
The Railway's "Home-Made"
Locomotives
Steel Wheels by Corporate Historian Jonathan Hanna
Locomotive 9126 is one of the SD9043MACs built by CPR at Ogden
Shops.
CPR got a
"do-it-yourself" reputation over the years. Whatever the railway needed, it built. Track,
bridges, stations, water towers, aqueducts, dams, and some of its railcars - including locomotives.
In November 1883, we built a steam locomotive in our own shops in Montreal - 4-4-0
standard-type locomotive No. 285. And, some six decades and 1,056 locomotives later, in June 1944, our
Angus Shops in Montreal produced 4-6-2 Pacific-type locomotive No. 1201. CPR supplied
itself with nearly one-third of all it's 3,257 steam locomotives.
But when it came to building diesel-electric locomotives, standardization, mass production and
assembly-lines ruled North America. And it just made better sense to go to the Western Hemisphere's
locomotive producers to feed the need.
CPR has now topped the 3,000-mark in diesel-electric locomotives since 1937. And that
includes those brought to the CPR motive power pool by the Soo Line; the Milwaukee Road; the Minneapolis, Northfield
and Southern; and the Toronto Hamilton and Buffalo railways. But, did you know that 50 of those 3,000 locomotives
were "Home-Made" - built in CPR's own shops?
CPR's first foray into home-built dieseldom was a one-off. And it happened by accident -
literally.
One of CPR's Montreal Locomotive Works (MLW) FA-1 locomotives - CP 4016 - built in 1950 had an accident
in Maine in August 1957. It was a write-off. There would be no more locomotive 4016 for nearly nine
years. That's when CPR took parts from a burnt out RS-10, CP 8557, and cobbled them together into a new
locomotive with traded-in components from CP 4014.
The "second" CP 4016 came out of CPR's Angus Shops in Montreal on 14 Mar 1966, the only
CPR "home-made" locomotive for better than half a century.
That is, until AC-traction was in full swing. CPR would order GM's product - an SD9043MAC - but the bulk
of the order would be assembled in Calgary. In CPR's own Ogden Shops. GM built the first dozen SD9043MAC locomotives
in its own plant in London, Ontario. They were numbered CP 9100 to 9111.
And, for the rest, GM delivered the locomotive frames by rail (CPR of course) and trucked most of the rest of the
components to Calgary's Ogden Shops, where CPR's own employees (Alstom hadn't yet brokered the deal for the Calgary
shops) built 49 SD9043MAC locomotives under the watchful vigilance of GM specialists and CPR's own Dave Hayden.
CPR built the rest of the GM SD9043MAC locomotives - CP 9112 to 9160 - including a specially-painted
No. 9159, that CEO Rob Ritchie custom-ordered in United Way livery when he was chairman for the Calgary
campaign in the fall of 1999.
| |
Vital Statistics
|
Numbers
|
CP 9100 to 9160
|
Class
|
DRF-43a
|
Builder
|
General Motors/CPR
|
Outshopped
|
1998 to 2000
|
Builder's Model
|
SD9043MAC
|
Horsepower
|
4,300
|
Cylinders
|
16
|
Axles
|
6
|
Maximum speed
|
75 mph (120 kph)
|
Length
|
81 ft. 8 in. (24.4 m)
|
Width
|
11 ft. 2 in. (3.4 m)
|
Height
|
15 ft. 10 in. (4.8 m)
|
Weight
|
426,000 lbs. (193,234 kg)
|
This Momentum magazine article is copyright
2005 by Canadian Pacific Railway and is reprinted here with their permission. All photographs, logos, and trademarks
are the property of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company.
|
