These are not the usual colors you see on most locomotives rushing through Albany on the Union Pacific mainline.
Having torn myself away from the national news Saturday night, I was taking my usual bike ride through the east end of old Albany when I heard the horn of a train coming down from the north.
Pulled by two locomotives of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the train made it to the Burkhart Street bike crossing just before I got there. By the time I got off the bike and got my phone out, this is all I managed to record:
As you saw, the engine bringing up the rear of this long train was from the Kansas City Southern. The two lead locomotives were, as I said, from the Canadian Pacific.
The explanation became apparent when I looked it up. The Canadian Pacific was combined with the Kansas City Southern in April 2023, and the combined railroad is now known as the Canadian Pacific Kansas City.
The company’s global headquarters remains in Calgary, Alberta, according to a press release from last year. It planned to build a U.S. operations center in Kansas City.
The railroad claims to be the only single line that connects Canada with the United States and Mexico. It has port access on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts as well as the Gulf of Mexico.
As this shows, you can learn something by standing at an Albany rail crossing and watching a train go by. (hh)
The line of hopper cars speeding past the crossing stretches out of sight.
Catching the lettering as the engine goes past: Kansas City Southern.
Thanks for another train blog.
Thanks Hasso, Love your train movies and the history that goes along with then.
You didn’t mention why there was a CP/KCS train running on UP tracks in Albany. It is very common to see these trains on the UP Washy Line in eastern Washington. They haul potash from the mines in Saskatchewan to T6 in Portlandia. This one was headed further south for unknown reasons.
That was a unit grain train from Canada, likely enroute to a feed lot in California’s Great Central Valley. When CPKC delivered the train to Union Pacific the locomotives stayed with it and will go through to destination and then return with the empty cars for refilling in Canada. When passing through Albany it was a UP train manned by UP employees using foreign railroad motive power.