The Canadian National Railway (French: Canadien National) (reporting mark CN) is a Canadian Class I freight railway headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, that serves Canada and the Midwestern and Southern United States.
CN is Canada’s largest railway, in terms of both revenue and the physical size of its rail network, spanning Canada from the Atlantic coast in Nova Scotia to the Pacific coast in British Columbia across about 20,400 route miles (32,831 km) of track.
In the late 20th century, it gained extensive capacity in the United States by taking over such railroads as the Illinois Central.
CN is a public company with 24,000 employees, and as of July 2019 it had a market cap of approximately CA$90 billion.
CN was government-owned, having been a Canadian Crown corporation from its founding to its privatization in 1995. As of 2019, Bill Gates is the largest single shareholder of CN stock.
The railway was referred to as “Canadian National Railways” (CNR) between 1919 and 1960.