Cordova Bay Station - CPR Momentum

2003-

Issue 2 September 2003

Canadian Pacific Railway Employee Communications
Room 500 401-9th Ave S.W. Calgary AB T2P 4Z4

STAYING POWER
By Corporate Historian Jonathan Hanna

CPR RS-23 8023

It may have been Number One Thousand for CPR, but it was a first for CAR.

With the delivery of diesel one thousand, it was well past time to put aside doubt and celebrate

A small but significant event happened 44 years ago outside Windsor Station in Montreal. On 10 September 1959, CPR got its 1,000th diesel-electric locomotive.

The locomotive, No. 8023, was delivered with much ado.

Officers and directors of CPR and the locomotive's manufacturer, Montreal Locomotive Works ( MLW ), celebrated the arrival. Most notable among the dignitaries was then-CPR president Norris R. Crump.

A generation before, Crump had written his 1936 master of engineering thesis on "Internal Combustion Engines in the Railroad Field". Crump believed in dieselization. But he would have to wait until 1949 for the venerable chief of motive power, H.B. Bowen, to retire.

Only when the stuck-on-steam motive power chief was no longer in control of locomotives did the railway start dieselizing in earnest.

Although the 1959 event is significant, to say the same about the locomotive is a bit of a stretch.

No. 8023 is one of 34 1,000-horsepower class DRS-10c RS-23 branch line locomotives that the CPR acquired in 1959 and 1960. It was first assigned to the Timiskaming Subdivision and maintained out of North Bay.

The very next year it was re-assigned to the then-Atlantic Region along with 24 of its sister class DRS-10c locomotives.

There the locomotives toiled or the next three decades in relative obscurity, in yards and branch lines in Quebec and New Brunswick.

No. 8023 ensured its place in diesel locomotive history in 1989, when it rolled out of Angus Shops as the first locomotive in the new "Canadian Atlantic Railway" ( CAR ) livery. The CAR was CPR's business unit in Atlantic Canada in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was formed in an attempt to make the perennially uneconomic Saint John Division into a viable arm of the railway.

All 34 CPR RS-23 locomotives were retired in the 1990s. No. 8023 and a dozen of its class DRS-10c sisters were sold to Iron Road for their Windsor & Hantsport Railway in Nova Scotia. Three others - Nos. 8021, 8029, and 8044 - went to Ontario Southland and are still in use on the Guelph Junction Railway. And No. 8032 is on display at the Fort Fairfield museum in Maine.

The six class DRS-10b RS-23 locomotives - Nos. 8013 to 8018 - were used on light duty northern Prairie branch lines. Their fuel capacity, tractive-effort, weight, and top speed were all less than their class DRS-10c sisters. Four are still active today - No. 8013 at the Guelph Junction Railway in Ontario; No. 8014 at the docks in Surrey, BC; No. 8017 at Saskferco in Belle Plaine, SK; and No. 8015, resplendently restored to its original maroon-and-grey livery, operates during the summer on a loop track at the Alberta Central Railway museum in Wetaskiwin, Alberta.

CPR has now had 3,000 diesel locomotives and counting, including those acquired with the Toronto, Hamilton & Buffalo, the Soo Line, and the Delaware & Hudson railways.

	Vital Statistics
Numbers	8019-8046
Class	DRS-10c
Builder	Montreal Locomotive Works
Outshopped	8 September 1959
Builder's Model	RS-23
Horsepower	1,000
Cylinders	6
Axles	4
Maximum speed	75 mph (120 kph)
Length	46 ft. - 3.75 in. (14 m)
Width	10 ft. - 8 in. (3.25 m)
Height	15 ft. - 3 in. (4.65 m)
Weight	233,000 lbs. (105,690 kg)
Cost	$133,872