In 1998, a succession of bad ice storms knocked out power to more than 1.5 million people in northeastern Canada. One of the affected towns, Boucherville, Quebec, was having a hard time coordinating its emergency response efforts with all of its municipal buildings out of power. That’s when Mayor Francine Gadbois had the idea of turning a diesel-electric locomotive into a giant power generator.
These particular types of locomotives use diesel to run onboard generators that create electricity to run the electric motors that actually power the train. So it’s basically just one very big electric generator. The Canadian National Railway agreed to lend two to the town, and after lifting the engines off the tracks with a crane and rolling them down the street to City Hall, the town had the power it needed to put its emergency response operations into high gear.
