Canadian National Railway
Canadian National Railway
Canadian National system map
Reporting
mark
CN
Locale
Canada, central United States
Dates of
operation
1918–
Track gauge
1,435 mm (4 ft 8+1⁄2 in) (standard
gauge); 3 ft 6 in (1,067 mm) narrow
gauge) on trackage in Prince Edward
Island until 1930 and in Newfoundland
until September 1988
Headquarters Montreal, Quebec, Canada
The Canadian National Railway (reporting
mark CN) is a Canadian Class I railway oper-
ated by the Canadian National Railway Com-
pany headquartered in Montreal, Quebec.
CN is the largest railway in Canada, in
terms of both revenue and the physical size
of its rail network and is currently Canada’s
only transcontinental railway company, span-
ning Canada from the Atlantic coast in Nova
Scotia
to
the Pacific
coast
in British
Columbia. Following CN’s purchase of Illinois
Central (IC) and a number of smaller US rail-
ways it also has extensive trackage in the
central United States along the Mississippi
River valley from the Great Lakes to the Gulf
of Mexico.
The railway was referred to as the Cana-
dian National Railways (CNR) between
1918 and 1960 and as Canadian Nation-
al/Canadien National (CN) from 1960 to
present.
The Canadian National Railway is a public
company with 22,000 employees and market
capitalization of 21 billion USD in 2008.[1]
History
The Canadian National Railways (CNR) was
created between 1918 and 1923, comprising
several railways that had become bankrupt
and fallen into federal government hands,
along with some railways already owned by
the government. In 1995, the federal govern-
ment privatized CN. Over the next decade,
the company expanded significantly in the
United States, purchasing Illinois Central
Railroad and Wisconsin Central Transporta-
tion, among others. Now primarily a freight
railway, CN also operated passenger services
until 1978, when they were assumed by VIA
Rail. The only passenger services run by CN
after 1978 were several mixed trains (freight
and passenger)
in Newfoundland, and a
couple of commuter trains