In recent months I've notice a real surge in the amount of foreign power on CP around here (Toronto)...mostly BNSF SD40-2 s, lease units, as well as other roads. Does anyone know what's driving that? I'm thinking that maybe CP has seen a surge in coal traffic and has sent many of their GE's out west... just my theory though.
From what I see on other forums there seem to be two answers at work. The first is the upsurge in business you may have been reading about in the newspapers. The second one seems to be a situation CP found itself in at the start of the last recession. It was cheaper to continue paying lease fees rather than early ending fees. Since you have the lease units still on the property, you might as well use them and save the engines you bought and paid for until later. And yes you do need the bigger GE's out west.
Bruce
So shovel the coal, let this rattler roll.
"A Train is a Place Going Somewhere" CP Rail Public Timetable
"O. S. Irricana"
. . . __ . ______
Part of the reason for the large fleet of leased locomotives (and the ex-BNSF SD40-2s are from NREX) is due to the recently departed VP of Operations believing that they had enough locomotives if you could just get the trains scheduled right (he was ex-CN). Needless to say it hasn't worked out and CP now has nearly 200 SD40 type locomotives on lease. They finally ordered 60 ES44AC locomotives from GE for this fall.
We had a meetint with our CP rep this week and his story sounds much like beaulieu's. He said the first of the new GE's should start showing up in Augus.
Sounds like he got the boot... but thanks to him we get to enjoy SD40-2s on CP for a bit longer.
Motive power leasing seems to be a routine practice for CP which goes back a while. A trade deal by the Russians to buy Canadian wheat in the mid-1960's caused a power shortage on CP which led to some short-time leasing at that time.
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