After the end of the second world war, Canadian passenger counts didn’t drop quite as immediately as they did to the south, and in 1953 the LT&L made one last big effort to bring back riders.

PA-2s 700-703 were ordered from MLW, becoming the only PAs produced by them & the only PAs owned by a Canadian railway. But, alas!, these new locomotives, rolling stock, and paint schemes weren’t enough to stem the bleeding, and when the great purge of 244-equipped power happened this quartet was sent back to Montréal as a trade-in for new T-6s.

In 2011, another PA found its way into the hands of the Parsons Vale Lines; The TdM had their eye on Algoma Central HEP car #76 (a ex-D&RGW PB-1 which had been turned into a steam generator car in the 1960s, converted again to a HEP car in the 1990s, and finally sold to the Algoma Central in 2007) and ended up trading a new HEP car converted from a class 9P coach for this now ancient hulk.

Among the many modifications that were done to this PB-1 was to replace the trimount passenger trucks it was riding on with a pair of EMD GP trucks, and by the time 2011 rolled around there were no others existing except for the ones under the two ex-NdeM PA-4s that had been preserved in Mexico. However, a pair of trucks from a Fairbanks-Morse Erie-built B unit were available; three of the 4 units that were part of the CPR’s CWR plant had been scrapped for the trucks, which were taken to be used in place of the now-vanished trimount passenger trucks on another two PA-4s that were being restored in the United States. (Why three sets of trucks? Good question! But in any case two of them went under the PAs, while the third pair ended up stuffed into a siding in Tigard, Oregon, where they stayed until the TdM bought them and repatriated them to Canada.)

The prime mover was gone, of course, so the TdM did a full mechanical upgrade by putting in a Cummins QSK60 prime mover and a full AC drivetrain with microprocessor-controlled anti-slip gear. The original underbody air reservoir, fuel, and water tanks had been replaced, so had to be remade from scratch, as well as the radiator fan enclosure (the TdM cheated here; they used 3 smaller exhaust fans hidden inside a traditional alco-style big fan enclosure), ventilation grilles, midbody doors. The dynamic brake is a standard ILW design, which – not surprisingly – looks exactly like the Alco dynamic brake it was modelled afterwards.

Restoring this unit was not a high-priority task for the TdM Shops, so it wasn’t finished until 2021, and then it sat until winter of 2026, when the LT&L purchased it from the TdM to add it to their diesel streamliner fleet.

It joined the roster at the start of winter 2026, and lives with the other streamliners at the roundhouse in Trois-Rivières.