On April 24, 1955 Canadian Pacific Railway heralded a new age in train travel with The Canadian. (similarly, Canadian National introduced their Super Continental at the same time) The new trains were introduced to reverse the trend away from passenger train travel being felt across North America. Postwar Canada believed passenger train travel had a healthy future, so CPR met the demand by introducing this fancy new service. There were two dome cars , a handsome dining car with excellent food, and a variety of sleeping arrangements: roomettes, double bedrooms, drawing rooms, berths and more. The Canadian was an "ultra-modern, lightweight, highly attractive, stainless-steel streamlined train" as reported in the papers in 1955. The train offered the world's longest (and Canada's only) dome ride almost 2,900 miles.
The last car of each train - known as the Park car - became the most well known. The car had a rounded-end observation lounge, a beverage room with the dome level above it, and first class sleeping space made up of a large drawing room and two bedrooms. Each car was named for a National or Provincial Park. The beverage room featured original murals by Canadian artists, some of whom were members of the Group of Seven.
Canadian Pacific Railway spent $40 million for the 173 stainless steel cars that would provide the new service - most of which remain in service today with VIA Rail Canada. The Canadian would be the last "built from scratch' streamliner for North America, and came to be as a result of the vision of N.R. "Buck" Crump, CPR's vice-president who oversaw the creation of the new diesel powered train. Not only would the new train revolutionize what the CPR had to offer the Canadian traveler of the time, it also released equipment to upgrade other trains and allowed retirement of CPR's older passenger equipment - effectively modernizing the whole fleet.
This train set is designed to replicate CPR's flagship streamliner, The Canadian. This MSTS ad-on features a matched A-B-B-A set of FP7's, and a consist based on The Canadian as it ran in its heyday. Correctly named and numbered cars are included, and the Banff Park observation car has 5 selectable interior views, with a choice of having typical music or not.
This model was extensively researched. And many thanks to Richard Foley, who contributed heavily to this project. Richard was a great asset, as he worked on the rebuilding of the original cars when CPR sold them to VIA. Thanks also to TrainArtisan.com and Gaetan Belanger for the original 3-D models that were used and modified to create this version of The Canadian for Microsoft Train Simulator. As well, a special thanks to the CPR corporate historian, Jonathan Hanna, for his assistance in researching details of the cars. This package is self installing, and is approximately 33 MB.
Questions/comments regarding these files and their use in Microsoft Train Simulator may be addressed to james_phipps@cpr.ca
Download MSI Installer (Approx 33.8mb)
Review the Install.txt
Review the License.txt
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