Caption: In summer 1993, my first trip to CP Guelph Jct. ironically wasn’t to photograph a CP train, but rather a promotional passenger train set. So the story goes, in July of that year CP sponsored the tour of the X2000, which was a Swedish State Railways train set built by Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) on their lines in Quebec and Ontario. The week-long promotional tour of the two provinces then followed several months of testing and display of the train in the United States by Amtrak. The Toronto portion of the tour was followed by two X2000 excursions to Guelph Junction and return via the Galt Subdivision.
I forget exactly how we found out about it, which was likely through word of mouth at the time, but my dad, myself and a friend arrived at Guelph Jct. ahead of the train’s arrival and immediately realized we weren’t the only ones there. Many other railfan’s, the media and everyone else in between were there to take in the event as well as the crew of the CP local to Guelph, which was powered by an RS18u. For a 13-year-old kid just learning how the mainline’s in Southern Ontario worked, there was so much to absorb let along a futuristic passenger train. I snapped many photos on my small Kodak camera of the train that day and in the end only a few really turned out not too bad.
Here the X2000 is seen arriving at Guelph Jct. amidst a large fanfare with Amtrak F40-2 380 powering the train on the opposite end. The caboose to the left is the tail-end of the one car CP local to Guelph.