After an especially bad ice storm in 1998, the mayor of Boucherville, Quebec, had the clever idea to borrow a diesel-electric locomotive and use it as a super-sized emergency generator.

 

Over a week in January 1998 three successive ice storms brought down power lines and the towers supporting them, leaving over 1.5 million people without power in the middle of winter in Boucherville, Quebec, Canada.

So while staring down endless questions about when power would potentially be restored, the mayor, Francine Gadbois, came up with a clever plan to at least get the town’s city hall and emergency warming shelters up and running in the immediate future.

Gadbois had recalled stories about them being used to provide power to small towns in rural northern Quebec several years prior. After some calls to the Canadian National Railway, the diesel locomotive  rolled into Boucherville to provide some much-needed assistance.

The rail line was close to the town’s city hall, but not close enough for this unusual application, so a crane was used to lift the diesel engine off its tracks and place it on Boulevard de Montarville. From there the locomotive completed the last 1,000 feet of its journey rolling down the street under its own power while its extreme weight caused the train’s flanged wheels to cut deep tracks into the asphalt road which later had to be repaired.

Cables were run from the diesel engine to the nearby municipal buildings and its throttle was set to a speed which would produce roughly 375 kilowatts of power

https://gizmodo.com/that-time-a-canadian-town-derailed-a-diesel-train-and-d-1846307148