The Canadian National Railway Company is a Canadian Class I freight railway headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, which 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 approximately 20,000 route miles of track. In the late 20th century, CN gained extensive capacity in the United States by taking over such railroads as the Illinois Central. CN is a public company with 22,600 employees and, as of July 2024, a market cap of approximately US$75 billion. CN was government-owned, as a Canadian Crown corporation, from its founding in 1919 until being privatized in 1995. As of 2019, Bill Gates was the largest single shareholder of CN stock, owning a 14.2% interest through Cascade Investment and his own Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. From 1919 to 1978, the railway was known as "Canadian National Railways". Wikipedia