Buffalo, Rochester & Pittsburgh 4-6-0 "Ten-Wheeler" Locomotives in the USA

Class E (Locobase 8013)

Data from CN to 1953 Locomotive Diagrams supplied in May 2005 by Allen Stanley from his extensive Rail Data Exchange. See also the Atlas of Alberta [], for a discussion of the CNoR. Works numbers were 1259-1265 in August 1887.

The profile for these Ten-wheelers shows a long-boilered design with a big firebox dropped between the last two drivers, spreading them over 3 feet wider than the distance between the first and second. Perhaps reflecting some disatisfaction with the design, 37 and 40 were rebuilt by the New York Locomotive Company of Rome, NY in February 1891.

The BR&P scrapped the 43 in 1903 and sold five of the class in 1905. The Canadian Northern bought three of them to group as the G-7-a class, two (#41-42) of which were renumbered 164-165 and the other (#37)was credited to James Bay Railway as their 101. The other two (#39, 42) went to the Texas Central as their 111-112. 38 remained on the BR&P until it was scrapped in 1917.

The CNoR was begun in the mid-1890s as a subsidized attempt by the government of Manitoba to establish a rival to the dominant Canadian Pacific and received its federal charter in 1899. According to the Atlas, William MacKenzie and Donald Mann established a business strategy that called for drawing much of the traffic in potentially busy areas by offering a low-cost rate structure. Even though they were subsidized, MacKenzie and Mann narrowed the gap between expenses and revenue and sped the date of service commencement by building a relatively cheap railway in what Mann described as "'the pioneering method of railroading'".

"As markets became established and towns and villages grew up," says the Atlas account, the railway lines were improved.

Beginning in the Winnipeg region, the CNoR spread in three directions. First its two developers, William MacKenzie and Donald Mann headed south and soon connected Winnipeg with the Lake Superior port of Port Arthur. Their focus was the creation of main lines across the Prairies that would be fed by an extensive network of branch lines.

Then the lines headed east along the northern shore of the Great Lakes to Quebec (where the railway built a tunnel for electrified railroading under Mount Royal) and west through Saskatchewan and Edmonton, Alberta (1905) to Vancouver. By 1915, the railway amounted to 9,971 miles when the final-spike ceremony was held at Basque, BC.

But it was ever the poor sister to the CPR and by 1912 the company was feeling the strain. the coming of World War One choked off much of the traffic on which the railway depended. In 1917, a Royal commission assessed the financial health and prospects of both the CNoR and the Grand Trunk Pacific and concluded that neither could stand on its own. MacKenzie in particular took the news that the railways would be forcibly combined very hard. By 1918, the establishment of the government-owned Canadian National ended the CNoR's independence.