Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Canadian Pacific Railway news, September 1971


As a proud former employee of the CPR at its Headquarters, my father requested that Spanner magazine, and later CP Rail News, be mailed to him. 


Spanner was a classic 'railway conglomerate' employee magazine (with advertisements) presenting information of employee and corporate activities which would also be of interest to shippers and the general public. To save space, my father kept only some articles from this magazine in his railway files.

As CP corporate structure changed over the years (see the article below) the advantages of a specialized railway newspaper became more obvious. At Schreiber in the late 1970s, a stack of these was available at the yard office for those employees interested in 'The Big Picture' - as Superintendent Small described it to trainees. 

My father kept all the CP Rail News copies sent to him over the years and 'for fun' (like beavers build dams 'for fun' - that's just what they do) he and I worked to make a computer-sorted (an early PC with an 8mHz clock, dot matrix printer) index of his collection. I think it was in the 1990s when my father appealed the apparent decision to cut him from the free mailing list - but to no avail. 

I hope you find the articles from the very first edition of the employee newspaper interesting. Certainly, they nail down dates when certain events in corporate history took place.

As usual, I have enlarged/lightened interesting photos to try to show more detail in obscure areas of the original.






Below: In 1971, 'You Asked for It' had salience because it had been a popular 1950s TV show.
You might find the image of David Rose on the 'You Asked for It' Wikipedia page interesting.





Do you think the Dayliner is indeed departing here?

... from the second edition of the newspaper.