A class act
Business trains have been de rigueur for decades. They’re a means to conduct meetings, entertain customers, and host executives in a way that only railroads can. They’re a symbol of pride and often a salute to history. CP’s business train is all that, and more. The company pulled out all the stops in putting together a business train like no other, assembling a small cadre of FP9s and an F9B and dressing them in CP’s classic Tuscan-and-gray paint scheme, with beaver shields proudly affixed to their streamlined noses, “Canadian Pacific” spelled out across their carbodies in the original lettering and in the script version introduced in the early 1960s. The accompanying consist, all painted in CPR Tuscan and comprised largely of heavyweights built in the railway’s own Angus shops in Montreal, recalls the grandeur of a time when CP could with a clear conscience proclaim itself “the world’s greatest travel system.” The cars carry names steeped in the railway’s rich history: Van Horne, Strathcona, Craigellachie, Mount Royal, and Banffshire, to name a few. CP puts the train to good use working systemwide on company business. The train has also served special occasions such as a 2017 crosscountry tour to celebrate “Canada 150,” the nation’s sesquicentennial. The Fs and select cars from the consist are also employed on Royal Canadian Pacific luxury excursions and private charters based out of the company’s corporate headquarters in Calgary. For the most part, riding the plush cushions of those impeccably maintained old heavyweights (or Selkirk, the stunningly refashioned dome/lounge created from the shell of a former Southern Pacific tavern car) is the province of the well-connected or the wellheeled. But the grand spectacle of Tuscan-and-gray Fs wheeling a regal-looking, all-Tuscan passenger train that conjures visions of legendary limiteds of old — the likes of the Dominion, the Overseas, and the Atlantic — is there for all with the good fortune to be in attendance when it passes.