Initial orders in the Company's 1947 equipment program have been announced by W.M. Neal, the Chairman and President, with 3,384 units involved and 2,500 steel-sheathed box cars for the grain, flour, and paper trades as the largest single order. Also included in the equipment for which contracts are already signed are 325 overhead-tank refrigerator cars, 250 hopper cars, 120 automobile carrying cars and 50 cabooses, while contracts are in the process of being made for 100 covered hopper cars and 26 mail-baggage-express cars.

Tied in with the program of freight improvement is an order for 13 diesel-electric switching locomotives to speed up terminal freight handling. They will join 42 already in yards at Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Calgary, and some of the order will be assigned to Vancouver. American Locomotive at Schenectady, New York, will build them.

In announcing the diesel-electric order Mr. Neal said the Company had been studying heavy freight and passenger runs with a view to adopting diesel-electric locomotives for road service. Tests under actual operating conditions are now being made on both eastern and western lines.

"The record of diesels in our yards and on American roads makes us doubt the economy of ordering more large steam locomotives," he said.

Eastern Car at New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, Canadian Car and Foundry at Montreal, National Steel Car at Hamilton, and the Company's own Angus Shops in Montreal are the plants which will turn out the equipment ordered. In the case of the automobile-carrying cars the 1947 order is in before completion of the 1946 order for 500 such cars.

The 2,500 box cars in the present orders will join a thousand ordered in November of 1945 and on which delivery was completed late last January. The 325 refrigerator cars for the freezer trade in fruit, vegetables, fish and meat follow 450 deliveries in 1946, the last having been turned over to the Company in December.