FRN

Fairbanks-Morse‘s foray into the diesel locomotive marketplace was, on balance, not successful — they sold far fewer locomotives than General Motors’s Electro-Motive Division (EMD) or even Alco, and they turned out to be lemons from a maintenance standpoint — but they still found their niches, and their buyers. Despite their unpopularity with rail crews, their rarity made them popular with railfans.

One of these was Canadian Pacific, who bought more than their share, almost all of them through Fairbanks-Morse’s Canadian partner, the Kingston-based Canadian Locomotive Company (CLC), which formerly built steam engines for Canadian roads. In many ways, the CPR was the biggest customer of Fairbanks-Morse designs: only the CNR had more C-Liners; only the Virginian had as many H16-44s or more H24-66 Trainmasters.

The Canadian Pacific Railway CLC Locomotives Page covers these locomotives in as thorough a manner as you might expect, with detailed information on each of the above-mentioned models — rosters, photos, etc. — plus a fourth model: a shitty little 44-ton switcher, the DT-2, based on a Davenport design.

(Also worth mentioning is that, for maintenance reasons, the CPR concentrated its CLC locomotives in southern B.C. I’m not sure if it’s the scenery or the unique diesel engines, but the CPR in southern B.C. is an awfully popular setting for model railroaders, myself included.)