page_title: Canadian National Railway
section_title: Electric
hierarchical_section_title: Canadian National Railway / Locomotives / Electric
caption_attribution_description: On June 2, 1995, the last commuter train hauled by venerable CN Z-1-a electric Bo-Bo #6710 has arrived in Montréal Central Station and pauses with the train crew. This locomotive was the same that had inaugurated the Mount Royal Tunnel, 77 years earlier.
context_page_description: The Canadian National Railway is a Canadian Class I freight railway headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, that serves Canada and the Midwestern and Southern United States.
  CN is Canada's largest railway, in terms of both revenue and the physical size of its rail network, spanning Canada from the Atlantic coast in Nova Scotia to the Pacific coast in British Columbia across about 20,400 route miles of track. In the late 20th century, it gained extensive capacity in the United States by taking over such railroads as the Illinois Central.
  CN is a public company with 24,000 employees, and as of July 2019 it had a market cap of approximately CA$90 billion. CN was government-owned, having been a Canadian Crown corporation from its founding to its privatization in 1995. As of 2019, Bill Gates is the largest single shareholder of CN stock.
  The railway was referred to as "Canadian National Railways" between 1919 and 1960.
context_section_description: CN inherited from the Canadian Northern Railway several boxcab electrics used through the Mount Royal Tunnel. Those were built between 1914 and 1918 by General Electric in Schenectady, New York. To operate the new Montreal Central Station, which opened in 1943 and was to be kept free of locomotive smoke, they were supplemented by nearly identical locomotives from the National Harbours Board; those engines were built in 1924 by Beyer, Peacock & Company and English Electric. In 1950, three General Electric centre-cab electric locomotives were added to the fleet. In 1952 CN added electric multiple units built by Canadian Car and Foundry.
  Electrification was restricted to Montreal, and went from Central Station to Saint-Lambert (south), Turcot (west), Montréal-Nord (east) and Saint-Eustache-sur-le-lac, later renamed Deux-Montagnes, (north). But as steam locomotives gave way to diesels, engine changeovers were no longer necessary, and catenary was eventually pulled from the west, east and from the south. However, until the end of the original electrification, CN's electric locomotives pulled Via Rail's trains, including its diesel electric locomotives, to and from Central Station.
  The last 2,400 V DC CN electric locomotive ran on June 6, 1995, the very same locomotive that pulled the inaugural train through the Mount Royal Tunnel back in 1918. Later in 1995 the AMT's Electric Multiple Units began operating under 25 kV AC 60 Hz electrification, and in 2014, dual-power locomotives entered service on the Mascouche line.
caption: First and last CN electric locomotive, 1918–1995
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