On the banks of the Columbia River, the city's mountain location makes it a skiing mecca, having been referred to as the "Switzerland of America" and the "Canadian Alps". Founded in the 1880s, it has grown primarily as the result of its being a railroad divisional point with large marshalling yards from the time the railroad passed through in 1883. Here, trains are prepared for the climb over the Rogers Pass, the first substantial climb for trains headed inland from Vancouver. Trains are split as necessary and robotic pusher engines added to help on the push over the pass. For trains bound for the coast the reverse is undertaken, with the pushers removed and trains usually lengthened for the relatively flat run to the coast.
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 Now completely superseded by containers, you won't see any piggybacks pass by.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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