Pacific Great Eastern 50ft Insulated Plug Door Boxcars made for Pacific Western Rail Systems

Pacific Western Rail Systems is pleased to announce our new run of “Pacific Great Eastern” - Limited Run PWRS – Micro-Trains Runner Pack.

This set will feature six PGE/ BC Rail 50’ Insulated Plug Door Boxcars painted harvest yellow with an aluminum roof, black lettering and the PGE Map Herald. They were built 1969 in Hamilton, Ontario as part of PGE/BCOL Rail series 8021 - 8030 and ride on roller bearing trucks.

BC Rail (reporting mark BCOL, BCIT), known as the British Columbia Railway between 1972 and 1984 and as the Pacific Great Eastern Railway (PGE) before 1972, was a railway that operated in the Canadian province of British Columbia between 1912 and 2004 (Now sold to CN). It was a class II regional railway and the third-largest in Canada, operating 2,320 km (1,440 mi) of mainline track. Its operations were owned by the public as a crown corporation from 1918 until 2004, when the provincial government leased operations for 99 years to CN. The track and other assets, including a marine division and stevedoring subsidiary as well as large tracts of real estate, remain under public ownership. 

Chartered in 1912, the railway was acquired by the provincial government in 1918 after running into financial difficulties. A railway that ran "from nowhere, to nowhere" for over 30 years, neither passing through any major city nor interchanging with any other railway, its southern terminus was at Squamish, BC, and its northern terminus at Clinton during that period.

It expanded significantly between 1949 and 1984. Primarily a freight railway, it also offered passenger service, as well as some excursion services, most notably the Royal Hudson excursion train.

The railway's operations only reached profitability in 1980, due to large capital and operating debts, which were intended as subsidies to develop and sustain mining and timber economies and employment in the regions it accessed, though during the 1980s it regularly posted significant profits, contributing to the public treasury significantly, and maintained a lower operating debt than any of the continent's other major railways. The railway's operations and management, as one of the province's largest crown corporations.

Features:

• Limited one time production run of these 6 road numbers
• Micro-Trains trucks and couplers
• Accurate painting and printing with correct road numbers for each paint scheme.
• Cars will feature weathering to reflect real world appearance

The Official Micro Trains SKU numbers for the individual cars in the set are (for purposes of collectors):

027 90 015: Pacific Great Eastern Boxcars:

027 91 015 – PGE 8021
027 92 015 – PGE 8023
027 93 015 – PGE 8024
027 94 015 – PGE 8026
027 95 015 – PGE 8029
027 96 015 – PGE 8030

Adrian Telizyn, photo