In 1949, the Montreal Locomotive Works delivered to Canadian Pacific the most powerful steam locomotives in Canadian history. But already, the diesel locomotives appeared in the landscape.
It was tall as a house, long as two and a half buses.
When it left the factory in March 1949, Selkirk number 5935 was the most powerful steam locomotive ever built in Canada.
It will also be the last.
Selkirk 5935 was one of a batch of six steam locomotives ordered by Canadian Pacific in 1948 and delivered the following year.
The Selkirk was described as a 2-10-4: two small wheels at the front to guide the locomotive on the tracks, 10 huge driving wheels, almost tall as a man, and finally four small load wheels at the rear, under the hearth and the cabin.
The locomotive was inseparable from its trailer – a tender, it was said. Itself mounted on 12 wheels, the tender contained its reserves of water (55,000 liters, as much as an above-ground swimming pool 24 ft in diameter) and fuel oil (19,000 liters).
The Selkirks were “the largest non-articulated steam locomotives in the entire British Commonwealth”, informs the Canadian railway museum Exporail.
However, these monsters had been built in Montreal.
Length: 29.9m
Weight: 204 tons
Drive wheel height: 1.6m
Price in 1949: $259,668
Locomotives built: 36
The Montreal Locomotive Works (MLW) had been founded, one suspects, in the city of the same name in 1883, under the name Locomotive and Machine Company of Montreal.
The company had been taken over by the American Locomotive Company (ALCO) in 1904, following a wave of consolidation that had swept across America.
Protected by tariff barriers instituted by the Canadian government, MLW built locomotives for the largest railroads in the country: Canadian Pacific, Grand Trunk, Canadian National.
The Selkirk was its flagship.
The Montreal company had launched the construction of this locomotive in 1929 for the Canadian Pacific. By the end of the year, the railroad had taken delivery of 20 Selkirk Class T1a locomotives, numbered 5900 to 5919. The 204-ton units could pull both freight and passenger carriages.
CP intended them to cross the Rocky Mountains and their neighbour, the Selkirk Range, which gave its name to the locomotive. Between Calgary and Revelstoke, British Columbia, the winding 422 km course was dotted with tunnels and hills, some sections of which had a considerable 2.2% gradient. At CP, it was nicknamed The Big Hill, the big hill.
By 1938, MLW had produced another 10 Selkirk locomotives, numbered 5920 through 5929, at its plant in east Montreal at the corner of Dickson and Notre-Dame streets. This T1b series benefited from several improvements that had made the Selkirk a few tons lighter, while increasing its power.
Are you dying to know more? In short: at the rear of the locomotive, a fireplace, which here is oil-fired, brings the air to a high temperature. The hot air and the combustion gases, drawn by a chimney, pass through a series of pipes which cross the boiler filled with water, in the center of the machine. The steam produced by boiling water accumulates under pressure in a dome. From there, pipes, controlled by valves, direct it to two cylinders arranged at the front, on either side of the chassis. Pushed and pulled by the pressure, the pistons drive two connecting rods each connected to five driving wheels. Here you are on track.
During the Second World War, the Dickson Street factory was dedicated to the construction of armored vehicles for the Canadian army. After the war, MLW got back on track by resuming the construction of steam locomotives. In 1948, Canadian Pacific placed an order for six new and improved Selkirks.
Because of the spectacular mountainous setting in which they operated, their size, and CP’s handsome black, gray and burgundy livery, the Selkirks were profusely photographed, to the point that “they are probably the most well-known locomotives in the world today. ‘America,’ a CP engineer wrote in Spanner, the company’s internal journal, in 1948.
The April-May 1949 issue of Spanner recounts the first outing of Selkirk 5935, “which should be the last steam locomotive to be acquired by Canadian Pacific, diesel locomotives being the solution of the future”.
Before being delivered to Calgary, the 5935 was tested on a 190 km route between Montreal and Eastern Ontario. “That day, almost a mile [1.6 km] of freight cars stretch behind her, 84 to be exact, and only two are empty. The total load amounts to 4490 tons,” it says.
CP still trusted him to cross the Rocky Mountains.
Already tested during the 1930s, diesel-electric locomotives (their large diesel engine was in fact a generator that powered electric motors) had made spectacular progress during the war. They were less massive, more flexible in use and did not require the intensive maintenance of steam locomotives. “Every five years, steam locomotives needed to be completely dismantled and rebuilt,” recalls Jean-Paul Viaud. It is to this maintenance that the huge Angus workshops of the CP, in the Rosemont district, were devoted, which will also disappear.
In 1949, the diesel-electric locomotive division of General Motors had founded General Motors Diesel in London, Ontario, to serve the Canadian market. In the same year, MLW had begun building diesel locomotives under license from ALCO.
Paradoxically, it was a native of Revelstoke, the terminus of the crossing of the Rockies, who was the instigator of the switch to diesel at Canadian Pacific. Born in 1904, Norris Roy Crump had started working for the CP at the age of 16, while continuing his studies. Appointed president in 1955, he presided over the complete dieselization of the fleet. CN took the same route.
“In 1960, we can say that it was over: Canada gave up steam,” says Jean-Paul Viaud.
The last six Selkirks, those built in 1949, were retired in 1959. They had barely served ten years.
Acquired by the American company Worthington in 1964, then by Bombardier in 1975, the MLW undertook the construction of the LRC passenger train (for light, fast and comfortable), whose finely profiled locomotive had a career of around twenty years in the Quebec City-Windsor corridor.
Bombardier having abandoned the construction of locomotives in 1985, the Montreal factory was sold in 1988 to General Electric Canada, which closed it permanently in 1993. Disused, it burned down a few years later.
Two Selkirk locomotives escaped scrap. 5931 is kept at Heritage Park in Calgary. The very last built, the 5935, is the subject of the attentive care of the Canadian railway museum Exporail, in Saint-Constant.
The venerable machine still wears its beautiful CP livery.
