by Kevin J. Holland/photos as noted
This year marks two momentous anniversaries for VIA Rail Canada’s Canadian, the venerable but thoroughly modernized Budd domeliner that links Toronto with Vancouver and traverses some of North America’s most spectacular scenery over its 2,775-mile (4,466-km) route. Canadian Pacific inaugurated The Canadian 70 years ago, on April 24, 1955, in head-to-head competition with rival Canadian National’s Super Continental, launched between the same endpoints on the same day. Both trains blended new streamlined lightweight rolling stock with modernized heavyweight cars, and both were diesel-powered for their entire cross-country runs.
From the two railways’ perspectives, both trains were upgrades of their existing fleet leaders between those end points, CP’s Dominion and CN’s Continental Limited, offering new rolling stock and accelerated schedules in pursuit of passenger profits. While both of those trains had seen a partial re-equipping beginning in the late 1940s, with a smattering of rebuilds and new streamlined cars modernizing their otherwise antiquated and war-weary consists, that wasn’t enough to distract the traveling public from the growing temptations of flying or driving.
ABOVE: Westbound Train 1 runs between the Upper and Lower Spiral Tunnels en route from Lake Louise, Alta., to Field, B.C., on May 19, 1963. —Peter A. Cox photo, courtesy Val Cox and Mark A. Perry
CP’s new train was conceived as a domeliner, and The Canadian employed the first such equipment to be owned by a Canadian railway. CN contemplated including new dome cars in its original Super Continental equipment orders to Pullman‑Standard, and briefly considered bi-level Budd passenger cars later in the 1950s. CN management balked on both occasions, not wanting to be seen as spendthrift with its public purse strings. The Super Continental finally got domes a decade after its debut, in the form of six secondhand cars acquired from The Milwaukee Road in 1964-65, and three Budd dome-sleepers leased from Baltimore & Ohio. CN refurbished the ex-Milwaukee Road cars with expansive upper-level lounges in the early 1970s (replacing the original coach seating), and they lasted into the VIA era, still assigned to the Super Continental west of Winnipeg until their retirement in 1981.
As for that second momentous anniversary, VIA’s Canadian was reinvented 35 years ago, on January 15, 1990, when politically driven cuts slashed the company’s long-distance and regional network. The Canadian was discontinued over the CP route through Lake Louise, Banff, and Calgary, and along the north shore of Lake Superior, that it had called home since 1955. Its VIA running mate over the more northerly Canadian National route through Edmonton and Jasper, Alta., the Super Continental, was fully re-equipped with the displaced Budd rolling stock and was renamed the Canadian.
ABOVE: Kokanee Park wears CP Rail’s Multimark image as it brings up the rear of The Canadian, eastbound at Banff, Alta., in September 1974. —Kevin EuDaly collection
So, while VIA’s current incarnation of the Canadian remains a Budd domeliner (the last of its kind in regular service), it is, effectively, the renamed and re-equipped vestige of the Super Continental, plying most of that train’s CN route.
Buck, Budd, and Big Plans
But back to the beginning. As a Canadian Pacific vice president, Norris R. “Buck” Crump (1904-1989) had sampled the domes and other futuristic amenities of the General Motors/Pullman-Standard “Train of Tomorrow” in 1949, and was also familiar with the California Zephyr, introduced by Western Pacific, Rio Grande, and Burlington Route in March of that year.
ABOVE: With a young moose looking on from the edge of the Bow River, VIA Train 2, the eastbound Canadian, rolls through Morant’s Curve en route between Lake Louise and Banff, Alta., in May 1987. The location, at Mile 113 of CP’s Laggan Subdivision, was made famous by CP company photographer Nicholas Morant. The train is led by VIA 6400, the company’s first F40PH-2D, with former CN F9B 6612 providing steam to heat the cars. —Kevin J. Holland photo
Crump was an expansive pro-passenger thinker, and his vision was not limited to the company’s rail operations: he also led CP to acquire its final three Empress transatlantic ocean liners between 1955 and 1960. He acknowledged, in hindsight, that the timing of the The Canadian and Empress acquisitions, both rapidly over-taken by airline competition, was unfortunate — even though CP’s own airline contributed to at least some of that domestic and international traffic erosion. Indeed, The Canadian was the next-to-last new streamliner introduced at the trailing end of the North American postwar boom, an era that ended with Burlington Route’s re-equipped Denver Zephyr of 1956. To-day, VIA’s Canadian stands alone as the last remnant of that era in regular service.
CP had been a customer of the Budd Company since acquiring its first Rail Diesel Cars in 1953. At the same time, plans for a new transcontinental passenger train were coalescing at CP’s Montreal head-quarters, with Budd the favored supplier thanks to its stainless-steel engineering. Although the 155-car order — subsequently increased to 173 cars, and the largest single order received by Budd up to that time, or placed by CP — would be built in Pennsylvania, a wide assortment of components, produced in Canada and worth approximately $7 million, were specified to reduce import duties at delivery…
ABOVE: Laurentide Park and two Chateau sleepers rebuilt for Prestige Sleeper Class service bring up the rear of the Canadian as the train rolls through Manitoba in August 2017. The enlarged windows of these cars’ bedrooms extend up into the letterboard, which is painted dark gray on the Prestige-class cars rather than the usual blue. —Mark A. Perry photo