Caption: The CP E&N mainline ended at mile 0 at Store and Cormorant Streets in Victoria, but rails continued compass northward on Store Street to serve industrial customers and a freight shed and transloading yard. A priority customer was Swift Canadian Company’s meat packing plant, frequently the first switch move for the Victoria 0600 yard crew. On Monday 1979-04-23, their assigned unit was Baldwin DS4-4-1000 CP 7070, shown here spotting a mechanical refrigerator car to Swift’s, engineer Ken Barr.

Note the clear display of the unit number ahead of the cab, compared with the well-worn lettering on the hood side. An often-applied theory of mine was that an engine deserves its number clearly displayed, done bit by bit on quiet graveyard shifts at the roundhouse.

CP 7070 is notable as the only one of CP’s eleven Baldwin switchers to never serve on Vancouver Island for the first 29 years of their existence since new in 1948. By some happy coincidence, with most of the switchers out of service, 7070 survived to finally visit the E&N starting in January of 1978, and with 7072 lasted until April 1982.