The Canadian National Railway 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 20,400 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 24,000 employees, and as of July 2019 it has a market cap of approximately CA$90 billion. CN was government-owned, having been a Canadian Crown corporation from its founding in 1919 until being privatized in 1995. As of 2019, Bill Gates is the largest single shareholder of CN stock, owning a 10.04% interest through Cascade Investment and his own Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.