Portal:Trains/Anniversaries/January 15/More

This article lists anniversary events related to rail transport that occurred on January 15.

Events edit

1915 – The final spike is driven on the transcontinental Canadian Northern Railway at Basque, British Columbia.
1919 – Support beams of the Boston Elevated Railway's Atlantic Avenue line are severed and a train is derailed when molasses and debris are propelled under the railroad's superstructure in the Boston molasses disaster.
1953 – The brakes fail on Pennsylvania Railroad's westbound Federal Express passenger train; the train barrels through the end of track barriers and stationmaster's office at Union Station in Washington, D.C., but nobody is killed in the accident.
1960 – Canadian National Railway upgrades its signaling system on the Alexandria subdivision in Ottawa to centralized traffic control (CTC).^[1]
1990 – VIA Rail discontinues half of the passenger train services it offers across Canada, including reducing the number of transcontinental trains to one service connecting Toronto, Ontario, and Vancouver, British Columbia.^[2] After the last transcontinental passenger train travels its tracks in Ottawa, Canadian Pacific Railway officially abandons its 19.1 miles (30.7 km) long Carleton Place subdivision that connected Carleton Place to Nepean, Ontario.^[1]
1999 – Ownership of Canadian Pacific Railway's line connecting Sicamous and Kelowna, British Columbia is officially transferred to the Okanagan Valley Railway which had been operating over the line since December 1998.^[2]

1899 – Robert Stetson Macfarlane, president of Northern Pacific Railway 1951-1966, is born.^[3]

^ ^a ^b "Significant dates in Ottawa railway history". Colin Churcher's Railway Pages. December 18, 2006. Retrieved January 4, 2007.
^ ^a ^b "Significant dates in Canadian railway history". Colin Churcher's Railway Pages. November 28, 2006. Retrieved January 4, 2007.
^ Osthoff, Frederick C., ed. (1968). Who’s Who in Railroading in North America. New York: Simmons-Boardman. p. 314.