On page 17 of the November MRR, I noticed a Walthers ad for CN cylindrical hoppers. I thought they misspelled Canadian on the hopper.
After some Googling, I found Canadien is French for Canadian and found some images with that spelling.
I have never noticed that but I'm not real familiar with CN other then I like their logo and paint schemes. I have a couple CNs on my layout from the interchange.
Anyone know the history? Does one spelling mean something different from the other spelling?
I'm all wound up on coffee right now.
Pat Bandy
Freight cars often had the English spelling on one side and the French spelling on the opposite side. My guess is the use of the French spelling started towards the end of the 1960s. I don't know if there was a preference as to right and left side of the car; of course that may not always have been followed, especially with repaints.
John
No difference in meaning, simply a nod to the fact that Canada is supposedly a bilingual country. I say supposedly, because the only officially bilingual province is New Brunswick. As far as I know, all provincial governments do provide services in both French and English, as does the federal government, but it doesn't really go much further than that. I've discovered that's one reason that many model railroad paints are not available in Canada: I had always assumed that it was because of recently introduced regulations on shipping certain chemicals in the mail, but it turns out that the sticking point is the labels: not bilingual equals not allowed.
Wayne
Yes I'd say late 1960's is correct. I know by the early '70's the bilingual cars were very common.
Canada is officially a bi-lingual country, things like tax returns, driver's license applications, etc. have to be in both English and French. I think it is a private company now, but CN in the 20th century was basically owned and operated by the Canadian government, so it makes sense that their cars would be bi-lingual.
My recollection is that Athearn produced a bilingual CN boxcar about 1963. It could have been one of the batch of 10 cars that featured brass RP25 wheels (the first "blue boxes"). It had a wet noodle, also; that being introduced in 1961.
Ed
CN introduced their new modern logo in 1961. The railway was still government owned at the and part of the design concept of the new logo was to use just the "CN" initials (no "CNR" as in the old maple leaf logo) so it could work in both English (Canadian National) and French (Canadien National). With the new logo & paint scheme, the road name was done in English on one side, French the other (although all data was still English).
Chris van der Heide
My Algoma Central Railway Modeling Blog
cv_acr (although all data was still English).
(although all data was still English).
I wonder:
Was the data fully in English, or was it French with English units?
Not positive, but pretty sure it was all French. The idea was that someone would be able to do their job on the railroad, regardless of whether they only spoke English or only spoke French. Probably a lot less common than it used to be, but I'm sure you can still find folks in Quebec (especially in more remote hamlets) who only speak French.
I did a quick online search. I found this:
Note that everything except the railroad name is in English. And that the measurement units are American (I would say English, but that yacht has sailed). That includes the end lettering. The car was new in 1995. It's interesting that there are no metric units, as Canada is metric. Is it not? They could have both been put there, the way it's done on containers.
Of course, this is only one car.
Ed:
Canada is officially metric, except where we're not metric! Now doesn't that sound like a typical governmental bureaucratic solution! Some things stayed in Imperial measurements, like building materials, I think because of the difficulties that converting would have caused in the building trade.
There were problems with conversion in some areas. Perhaps the most famous was the Air Canada flight that ran out of fuel over Gimley, Manitoba because the re-fueling guys didn't understand metric measurements and didn't fill the tanks up properly. The pilots managed to make a dead stick landing on an abandoned airport runway outside of Gimley. The runway was being used for go-kart races at the time so the participents were sent scrambling when the plane approached. Amazingly there were no injuries, and IIRC the passengers said the landing was quite gentle.
It's not suprising that the units used on freight cars were not converted to metric. That would have precluded sending any metric cars south of the border.
I think the container labelling is a bit different because containers can be shipped all over the world whereas rail cars are limited to North America.
Dave
I'm just a dude with a bad back having a lot of fun with model trains, and finally building a layout!
Ignatosky On page 17 of the November MRR, I noticed a Walthers ad for CN cylindrical hoppers. I thought they misspelled Canadian on the hopper. After some Googling, I found Canadien is French for Canadian and found some images with that spelling. I have never noticed that but I'm not real familiar with CN other then I like their logo and paint schemes. I have a couple CNs on my layout from the interchange. Anyone know the history? Does one spelling mean something different from the other spelling? I'm all wound up on coffee right now.
It's to keep the Quebequa happy so they don't succeed from Canada and splitting the "great white north" in-half!
Rio Grande. The Action Road - Focus 1977-1983
hon30critter Ed: ..... There were problems with conversion in some areas. Perhaps the most famous was the Air Canada flight that ran out of fuel over Gimley, Manitoba because the re-fueling guys didn't understand metric measurements and didn't fill the tanks up properly....
.....
There were problems with conversion in some areas. Perhaps the most famous was the Air Canada flight that ran out of fuel over Gimley, Manitoba because the re-fueling guys didn't understand metric measurements and didn't fill the tanks up properly....
That is an amazing story of an amazing feat. And I recall NASA and JPL loss of Martian Climate mission in 1999 that "bounced" off the Martian gravitational field and waaaaaaaaay out into space forever, after $125 million and years of preparation because a Lockheed Martin employee used US units in his calculations instead of the metric that the rest of NASA and JPL had used. Oh my! That is the kind of error I would probably make too.....a bit of one and the other system still in my brain.