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Directional running in British Columbia keeps Canada's trade-based economy moving
On a dank September morning, Canadian Pacific Kansas City's Toronto-Vancouver intermodal hotshot train 101 rolls across Canadian Nationals steel arch bridge at Cisco, British Columbia, with the mighty Fraser River churning some 220 feet below.
Not 5 minutes later, an eastbound CN empty coal train roars out of the 595-foot Cisco Tunnel, crosses the Fraser on CPKC s three-span through truss bridge, and rumbles under the 12,800-foot No. 101, still making its way across the provinces longest river.
The over-under meet at one of Canadas iconic railroad locations puts an exclamation point on 90 minutes of nearly non-stop action featuring grain, intermodal, coal, and merchandise trains in the CN-CPKC Directional Running Zone, or DRZ, as the railways call it.
CN and CP have been archrivals for more than a century. They compete for customers every day, and in recent years they've feuded over executives, collided over interchange in Chicago, and waged an epic battle for the Kansas City Southern.
Yet for 24 years, they've been cooperating in the DRZ by sharing tracks for about 155 miles of the 235-mile corridor between Kamloops and Vancouver. "It's the right thing for the Canadian economy, it's the right thing for our customers, and it's the right thing for the railroads," says Derek Taylor, CN's executive vice president and chief field operations officer.
The sheer walls and fast-moving water of the Thompson and Fraser river canyons are formidable barriers to adding or extending passing sidings. By pairing their single-track mains and coordinating operations, CN and CPKC eliminated delays associated with meets - and aren't limited by passing-siding length. What the frenemies have created is a high-capacity, double-track route that keeps Canada's trade-based economy humming.
And it's a good thing they did. Without the DRZ and the overlapping coproduction area in Vancouver, neither railway could have handled the past two decades of phenomenal traffic growth fueled by trade with Asia. Since launching the DRZ in 2000, CN and CPKC have hauled a rising tide of bulk and merchandise traffic to export at Vancouver, as well as a surge in international container business to and from Canadas busiest port.
CN and CPKC sent an average of 58 trains per day...