In the late 1950s, the Canadian Pacific decided that it was time to pull the wire down on the CPEL lines in the golden horseshoe, because diesel fuel was cheaper that electricity + maintaining the overhead. This plan didn’t take into consideration all of the people who lived along the CPEL system, some of whom greeted the first run of the diesels with something less than complete enthusiasm (and in the case of Galt, public pressure forcing an ordinance saying that diesels couldn’t be run on the downtown industrial spur outside of the 9-5 window.)

So, after a month of increasingly agitated debate, the CP backed down on dieselising the switching district in Galt, and it stayed under wire until the CP put the lines up for abandonment and the newly-formed ORRC took them over.

However, by the time the dust had settled on the huge argument about the Galt switching district, most of the CPEL’s motive power had already been sold to other interurban lines (yes, even at this late date there were still a few other radials under wire!) leaving only Lake Erie & Northern #234, which had been sitting with a cracked frame and no trucks, available as motive power.

It was loaded onto a boxcar and sent to Montréal to be repaired at CPR’s Angus Shops, returning with a new frame and riding on a pair of trucks off a recently scrappd interurban coach.

LE&N #234 was still shuffling cars on the 20 block Galt industrial spur in 1986, when the ORRC purchased the last bits of the Lake Erie & Northern as part of their project to connect the two separate segments of their system together, and there it stayed until the last customer closed in 1994.

It spent a few years running on the TSR, but was eventually sidelined in favor of the newer class 320HB motors as traffic levels slowly declined. It spent about 10 years stored, but was then put on a long-term loan to the Simcoe Railway Historical Society, where it continues to operate today.