Caption: Bygones of past years:

Built in 1917 and at the time of this photo about 90 years old, Canadian Pacific 188625 is one of few wooden-single sheathed 36' Dominion Fowler boxcars left, preserved at the Toronto Railway Historical Association's Roundhouse Park. Back in the olden days, hundreds of Fowler design boxcars (and for that matter, thousands of wooden construction boxcars) formed the backbones of CN and CP's fleets of that era, before the all-steel boxcars began making inroads starting in the 1930's.

Visible in the rays of light shining through windows of the former CPR John St. Roundhouse is the lettering of its previous caretakers stenciled on the chipping red paint: the "Canadian Railroad Historical Association, T&Y* Division, Toronto" (*Toronto & York), who presumably saved or acquired this car from the CPR for preservation at one time in the past. Ownership was stenciled on the side to reflect this, and partially to prevent CP from accidentally forwarding the car to the scrapper, lest an errant crew picks said relic up and it ends up somewhere on CP.

Also, between rivets on its flanks are bits of stencil data from eons ago. This particular bit indicates a CM 418 truck inspection and any associated work was last performed by CP in Toronto, during March of 1988 (CM 418 is apparently an internal CP Mechanical Instruction Manual, Source). Old stencil dates and information was painted over and new data applied every time a car was reweighted, inspected, repaired, repainted, or bearings repacked. A railway would often have standardized colours, font stencils, etc across its network, but often times whatever was on hand was used (as was the case here with non-matching black paint).