Two of the very best, though, are the rail yards in Revelstoke and here in Golden. At Golden a Canadian Pacific (CPR) line from the south meets the mainline which runs to the coast. As well, from Golden trains have a substantial climb, whether they head east or west. To the east is the climb over the Continental Divide, while to the west is the climb over the Rogers Pass, equally daunting for a train.
As a result the large rail yards here are used to split up and put together trains in preparation for the climb to the east or the west, adding robotic pusher engines as needed. Here one will see tons of rolling stock, some of the CPR's largest engines, switching engines, big honking rotary snowplows and MOW equipment.
Though the traffic drops off somewhat on the weekends, one will see a lot of very long trains pass through daily, most well over 100 cars in length. A great many of them today are
unit trains, that is trains of a single type of car, such as coal trains, tanker trains, ore trains, container trains or grain trains. As a matter of fact one may go days without seeing the standard boxcar.
Did you know? - The CPR was the first railroad to adopt
piggyback trains. Now completely superseded by containers, you won't see any piggybacks pass by. In the '70s the writer worked for several years in the trucking industry. On the weekends part of his job entailed pulling trailers to and retrieving trailers from "
The Pig". At that time the CPR seemed to be concentrating to a great extent on piggyback trains while Canadian National (CN) was already turning toward container trains. The CN container yard was very near where the writer worked but he pulled very few containers in or out of that yard.
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