Canadian Pacific Railway

Canadian Pacific Railway

Company type	Public
Traded as	TSX: CP NYSE: CP
Industry	Rail transport
Founded	February 16, 1881 (1881-02-16)
Headquarters	Calgary, Alberta , Canada
Area served	Canada Contiguous United States
Key people	Andrew Reardon (Chairman) Keith Creel (President and CEO)
Website	www.cpr.ca

An eastbound CPR freight train at Stoney Creek Bridge descending from Rogers Pass

The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), also known as CP Rail (CP) is a railway in North America with track in both Canada and the United States. It was built between Eastern Canada and British Columbia between 1881 and 1885. Although it used to go all the way to Atlantic Canada, it does not do so anymore.

When British Columbia became part of Canada in 1871, one of the promises the federal government made was to link it to the rest of Canada by rail. Most of the trains that use the CPR carry freight, and the CPR used to run passenger train services until they were taken over by Via Rail in 1978. For many years, until the airplane was invented, the railway was the only way to move people across the country. Because of this, it had a big role in the settlement and development of Western Canada.

The company that owns the CPR, Canadian Pacific Railway Limited, was once one of the largest and most powerful companies in Canada. It owns about 20,000 kilometres (12,500 mi) of track from Montreal in the east to Vancouver in the west and Edmonton to the north. CP also has track in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago, and New York City in the United States.

The logo of the CPR company is a beaver, the national symbol of Canada, and it has its headquarters in Calgary, Alberta and its U.S. operations are in Minneapolis. It trades on both the Toronto Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker CP.

Further reading

• Berton, Pierre (1970). The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871–1881. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto. ISBN 0-7710-1326-4.
• Berton, Pierre (1971). The Last Spike. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto. ISBN 0-7710-1327-2.
• Cruise, David and Alison Griffiths (1988). Lords of the Line. Viking, Markham, Ontario. ISBN 0-670-81437-7.
• Innis, Harold A. (1971) [1923]. A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway. University of Toronto Press, Toronto. ISBN 0-8020-1704-5.
• Leggett, Robert F. (1987). Railways of Canada. Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver, British Columbia. ISBN 0-88894-581-7.
• Sandford, Barrie (1981). The Pictorial History of Railroading in British Columbia. Whitecap Books, Vancouver, British Columbia. ISBN 0-920620-27-2.
• The Premier's Funeral (11 June 1891). The Woodstock Evening Sentinel Review, p. 1.

Other websites

• Canadian Pacific Railway official website
• Canadian Railway history and stories
• CPR, from Sea to Sea: The Scottish Connection Archived 2005-03-13 at the Wayback Machine — Historical essay, illustrated with photographs from the CPR Archives and the McCord Museum's Notman Photographic Archives
• Lavalle, Omer; Marshall, Tabitha (4 March 2015). "Canadian Pacific Railway". The Canadian Encyclopedia (online ed.). Historica Canada. Archived from the original on 14 April 2012. Retrieved 2 March 2017.
• The Canadian Pacific Railway inception - A rich digital set of unique artifacts, archival and graphic material from the UBC Library Digital Collections
• The Early Chinese Canadians: Working in B.C.: Gold, Railway, Mining, and Salmon
• Royal Canadian Pacific
• Winchester, Clarence, ed. (1936), "The conquest of Canada", Railway Wonders of the World, pp. 65–74, illustrated account of the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway