How the Vancouver Service Area packs a lot of railroading into a small area I spent much of Monday visiting the Canadian Pacific in Vancouver, B.C., my first trip to this Pacific Northwest metropolis made famous by the 2010 Winter Olympic games. What CP does in and around Vancouver is worthy of a gold metal itself. I saw incredible amounts of freight moving in a highly congested area, and I heard from railroaders who’d developed some ingenious ways to move tonnage. Jennifer Hunt in the corporate communications department picked me up off Amtrak’s Cascades (more on that in tomorrow’s blog installment) and showed me a five-mile stretch of busy “south side” grain elevators and docks and intermodal docks that would make any model railroader wince for trying to cram too much switching track into so little space. Mike LoVecchio, senior manager of media relations joined us, and we proceeded to Port Coquitlam Yard, several miles to the east, where Vancouver Service Area Managers of Operations Brad Thiede and Chuck Dennison as well as Supervisor of Structures Eric Williamson talked about this busy terminal, the fourth largest on the CP system. The biggest operational enhancement in this terminal is the cooperating agreement with Canadian National. CP handles cars for both lines in the “south side” port area, and CN does likewise for both carriers on the “north side.” This is an outgrowth of the directional running practiced by the two carriers in the Fraser River Canyon. What’s amazing in this region are the number of waterways that CP crosses on three swing bridges that are usually set for the railroad and can be changed on 30 minute notice, Williamson says. Afterward, we drove across the Pitt River and pulled into a domestic intermodal yard that was built 10 years ago to replace a much smaller and less convenient yard. Intermodal yard manager Larry Metz says CP runs two trains east out of the yard. One is a Montreal-bound train that is 7,000 feet long, but there’s a catch to it. Another intermodal train that runs to Toronto stretches 12,000 feet, but there’s a dearth of track space to build such a long train, so the Montreal-bound train carries an additional 2,000 feet of intermodal cars about 60 miles inland where they’re dropped to await the Toronto-bound train so it can fill out to 12,000-feet before heading east with distributed power. It’s all about making the railroad more efficient, Metz says. That’s a good way of thinking about this jam-packed terminal: It’s all about making things work with what you’ve got. You’ll learn more about this distributed power operation, by the way, in an extensive cover story in our September issue. This same story will cover General Electric’s Locotrol equipment and distributed power operations on North American Class I railroads.
Canadian Pacific power lays over at the Vancouver, B.C., area yard in Port Coquitlam. This is one of the busiest points on CP. Jim Wrinn photo
My hosts at Canadian Pacific, Mike LoVecchio and Jennifer Hunt. Jim Wrinn photo
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