page_title: Canadian Pacific Railway
section_title: Freight trains
hierarchical_section_title: Canadian Pacific Railway / Freight trains
caption_attribution_description: English: CP Rail Loco in Thunder Bay ON
context_page_description: The Canadian Pacific Railway, known as CP Rail between 1968 and 1996 and simply Canadian Pacific, is a historic Canadian Class I railway incorporated in 1881. The railway is owned by Canadian Pacific Railway Limited, which began operations as legal owner in a corporate restructuring in 2001.
  Headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, it owns approximately 20,100 kilometres of track in six provinces of Canada and into the United States, stretching from Montreal to Vancouver, and as far north as Edmonton. Its rail network also serves Minneapolis–St. Paul, Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago, and Albany, New York in the United States.
  The railway was first built between eastern Canada and British Columbia between 1881 and 1885, fulfilling a commitment extended to British Columbia when it entered Confederation in 1871. It was Canada's first transcontinental railway, but no longer reaches the Atlantic coast. Primarily a freight railway, the CPR was for decades the only practical means of long-distance passenger transport in most regions of Canada, and was instrumental in the settlement and development of Western Canada.
context_section_description: Over half of CP's freight traffic is in grain (24% of 2016 freight revenue), intermodal freight (22%), and coal (10%) and the vast majority of its profits are made in western Canada. A major shift in trade from the Atlantic to the Pacific has caused serious drops in CPR's wheat shipments through Thunder Bay. It also ships chemicals and plastics (12% of 2016 revenue), automotive parts and assembled automobiles (6%), potash (6%), sulphur and other fertilizers (5%), forest products (5%), and various other products (11%). The busiest part of its railway network is along its main line between Calgary and Vancouver. Since 1970, coal has become a major commodity hauled by CPR. Coal is shipped in unit trains from coal mines in the mountains, most notably Sparwood, British Columbia, to terminals at Roberts Bank and North Vancouver, from where it is then shipped to Japan. CP hauls millions of tonnes of coal to the west coast each year.
  Grain is hauled by the CPR from the prairies to ports at Thunder Bay (the former cities of Fort William and Port Arthur), Quebec City and Vancouver, where it is then shipped overseas. The traditional winter export port was Saint John, New Brunswick, when ice closed the St. Lawrence River. Grain has always been a significant commodity hauled by the CPR; between 1905 and 1909, the CPR double-tracked its section of track between Fort William, Ontario (part of present-day Thunder Bay) and Winnipeg to facilitate grain shipments. For several decades this was the only long stretch of double-track mainline outside of urban areas on the CPR. Today, though the Thunder Bay-Winnipeg section is now single tracked, the CPR still has two long distance double track lines serving rural areas, including a 121-kilometre (75 mi) stretch between Kent, British Columbia, and Vancouver which follows the Fraser River into the Coast Mountains, as well as the Canadian Pacific Winchester Sub, a 160-kilometre (100 mi) stretch of double track mainline which runs from Smiths Falls, Ontario, through downtown Montreal which runs through many rural farming communities. However, CPR is in the midst of partially dismantling the stretch of double track mainline on the Winchester Sub. There are also various long stretches of double track between Golden and Kamloops, British Columbia, and portions of the original Winnipeg-Thunder Bay double track (such as 30 kilometres (20 mi) through Kenora and Keewatin, Ontario) are still double track.
  In 1952, the CPR became the first North American railway to introduce intermodal or "piggyback" freight service, where truck trailers
  are carried on flat cars. Containers later replaced most piggyback service. In 1996, the CPR introduced a scheduled reservation-only short-haul intermodal service between Montreal and West Toronto called the Iron Highway; it utilized unique equipment that was later replaced (1999) by conventional piggyback flatcars and renamed Expressway. This service was extended to Detroit with plans to reach Chicago however CP was unable to locate a suitable terminal.
caption: CP EMD SD90MAC locomotive in Thunder Bay, Ontario
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