Northern Alberta Railways

Company History: NAR came together in 1929 when several railroads were combined under joint ownership of Canadian National and Canadian Pacific. One line ran from Edmonton, Alberta northeast to Lac La Biche and then Fort McMurray. The other line ran northwest from Edmonton to Smith where it turned west for Grande Prairie and ultimately to Dawson Creek just over the British Columbia border. A branch came off that main at McLennan north to Peace River then west to Hines Creek. Traffic on these lines was mostly grain.

In 1958, Pacific Great Eastern finished their line to Dawson Creek from the Pacific coast. This and new highways in the area syphoned traffic from NAR. In 1964, CN opened their isolated (from other CN lines) Great Slave Lake Railway from a junction on the NAR near Peace River to mines in the sub-Arctic region. This added considerable lead and zinc ore traffic to the NAR. Nevertheless, trains were infrequent on the NAR. With 923 route miles, NAR required just 21 diesels. The diesel fleet consisted of 10 GP9’s, 7 GMD1’s, and 4 SD38-2’s. To put that into perspective, the busy Clinchfield Railroad required nearly five times as many locomotives to run less than a third of the mileage.

In 1980, Canadian Pacific sold their half of NAR to Canadian National and on the first day of 1981, NAR operations were folded into CN.

Successor/Parent History: The Canadian National Railway Company (reporting mark CN) is a Canadian Class I railway headquartered in Montreal, Quebec that serves Canada and the Midwestern and Southern United States. CN's slogan is "North America's Railroad". CN is a public company with 24,000 employees. It had a market capitalization of 32 billion CAD in 2011. CN was government-owned, having been a Canadian Crown corporation from its founding to its privatization in 1995. Bill Gates was, in 2011, the largest single shareholder of CN stock.

CN is the largest railway in Canada, in terms of both revenue and the physical size of its rail network, and is currently Canada's only transcontinental railway company, spanning Canada from the Atlantic coast in Nova Scotia to the Pacific coast in British Columbia. Its range once reached across the island of Newfoundland until 1988, when the Newfoundland Railway was abandoned.

Following CN's purchase of Illinois Central (IC) and a number of smaller US railways, it also has extensive trackage in the central United States along the Mississippi River valley from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Today, CN owns about 20,400 route miles (32,831 km) of track in 8 provinces (the only two not served by CN are Newfoundland & Labrador and Prince Edward Island), as well as a 70-mile (113 km) stretch of track (see Mackenzie Northern Railway) into the Northwest Territories to Hay River on the southern shore of Great Slave Lake; it is the northernmost rail line anywhere within the North American Rail Network, as far north as Anchorage, Alaska (although the Alaska Railroad goes further north than this, it is isolated from the rest of the rail network).

The railway was referred to as the Canadian National Railways (CNR) between 1918 and 1960, and as Canadian National/Canadien National (CN) from 1960 to the present.

Read more on Wikipedia.

Brief History: Canada is a North American country stretching from the U.S. in the south to the Arctic Circle in the north. Major cities include massive Toronto, west coast film centre Vancouver, French-speaking Montréal and Québec City, and capital city Ottawa. Canada's vast swaths of wilderness include lake-filled Banff National Park in the Rocky Mountains. It's also home to Niagara Falls, a famous group of massive waterfalls.