Comments on: Busy morning on the Coronado. These section fellows left first thing to do work west of Redwater. When busy at the air base, they will call 2 extra fuel trains in a week rather than just the one on Thursdays. So, on this Wednesday, a fuel train headed out at 9:30 (5578, 5587). At 10:30 a unit train with 30 loads goes home (4300, 9163, 4368). Then at 11:45 584 rolls east thru town with empty grain cars (5568, 5514). Following right behind 584 are the section guys. Coming home for lunch. They had their share of stick handling with 3 trains going by in the morning. Also, CN 16013, the last number is hard to make out, could be 3 or 5.

By: terry.oshell

terry.oshell — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 18:08:48 +0000

Nice. Great memories of riding the rails back in motorcar days.

By: Brundle

Brundle — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 00:43:00 +0000

Great big diesel units and 2 guys ride up there. The guys that swung hammers, pulled wrench’s all day and worked in dust, a zesty sardine can that rode like a lumber wagon.

By: Klaucker

Klaucker — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 23:33:01 +0000

So cool, and this type of railway equipment was often photo neglected in favour of prize mainline or even switching movements

By: Brundle

Brundle — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 01:41:21 +0000

Thanks for the all the great number info Paul. That is a large fleet of motor cars to take care of. It could not have been cheap to run and maintain, trucks were certainly the way to go.

By: Paul O'Shell

Paul O'Shell — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 00:51:58 +0000

Always nice to a piece of Work Equipment show up.
Great action shot of a Fairmont MT-14 section track motor car. It’s powered by a 20 horsepower Onan CCKB gasoline engine coupled to a 2-speed reversible transmission. The running number would certainly be in the 160-1x series.

CN Track Motor Car Numbering:

At one time, there were 1500+ track motor cars on the CN system. They were a major portion of the CN work equipment inventory.

Motor cars were numbered by type of car (inspection, section, gang).

If memory serves me correctly, they were numbered as follows;

CN 130-xx through CN 149-xx inspection type motor car (2-man)

CN 150-xx through CN 179-xx section type motor car (4-6 man)

CN 180-xx through CN 195-xx gang type motor car (8+ men)

There were also some special numbering sequences;
CN Telecommunications CN 100-xx
Test, demo, special projects CN 999-xx