25 July 2009
Ribbon of Steel
Sault Ste. Marie Ontario - The
300-kilometre Canadian Pacific Railway branch line between Sault Ste. Marie and Sudbury has ferried more than freight and
passengers between the two communities in its more than 100-year existence.
The ribbon of steel is also credited as having shuttled in prosperity to Sault nearly 122 years ago - the foundations of industrial
development and community growth.
Quebec-based Huron Central Railway Inc., the shortline operator which has been leasing the branch line from Canadian
Pacific for over a decade, since 1997, claims to have lost money each of the past four years.
It has announced it will discontinue the western portion of the service, between the Sault and McKerrow, near Espanola, in about three
weeks, on 15 Aug 2009, and shut down completely by 31 Oct 2009.
A pullout by Huron Central, with no replacement operator, could lead to the branch line being declared abandoned and the tracks
eventually removed.
Assorted stakeholders, including businesses and municipalities, have been brainstorming over the past several months about how to
salvage the freight service - described as essential to regional growth.
Big News in 1887
The isolated community known as Sault Ste. Marie was populated by a little over 1,000 residents and everyone reportedly showed up,
schools were emptied, when No. 210, a wood-burning CP locomotive puffed into the Oakland Avenue train station on a cold
late October morning in 1887.
The opening of the branch line, which had stalled at Algoma Mills, east of Blind River for several years, provided the Sault with two
rail connections to the outside world - the rail bridge spanning the St. Mary's River and connecting with American rail operators
having opened the same year.
Prior to the arrival of the railway, the town had to rely on seasonal shipping for provisions and mail, as well as transportation
in-and-out of town, service which was disrupted through the winter months.
Two years after the opening of the railway, the city was experiencing its "first large boom" as hundreds of tradesmen,
laborers, and their families began arriving to begin work on the Sault Shipping Canal and more than two dozen new businesses had
opened.
The town population, listed at 1,621 by the assessment office in 1890, more than doubled to nearly 4,200 by 1900 and to nearly 11,000
by 1910.
Telephone service arrived within five years of the railway, in 1892, and entrepreneur Francis H. Clergue, whose
short-lived industrial empire included present day Essar Steel Algoma, Great Lakes Power, St. Marys Paper Corp., Algoma
Central Corp., and both PUC Inc. and the Public Utilities Commission, arrived on the scene seven years later, in 1894.
1910 Wreck
The first major tragedy along the rail line occurred in January, 1910, near Webbwood, about 200 kilometres east of the Sault, when 70
of 100 westbound passengers aboard the Soo Express were killed when the train struck a railway bridge.
Those not killed on impact, and an ensuing fire, drowned in the deep waters of the Spanish River as a first-class
passenger coach with about 50 passengers aboard rolled down a steep embankment and crashed through foot-thick ice.
A little over a year earlier, in October, 1908, there was a rail tragedy south of the border, just across the Mackinaw Straits,
between Cheboygan and Alpena, when 23 residents perished fleeing a raging out-of-control wildfire.
An emergency relief train had been organized to shuttle the residents of the village of Metz out of the path of the fire but upon
departure it raced into the inferno itself. Track rails had been loosened by the intense heat, the locomotive derailed, and the train
was engulfed in flames.
The fire, which consumed more than 10,000 square kilometres of forest, was described as one of the most destructive in Michigan's
modern history.
Daily rail passenger service into the Sault ran 76 years, from 1887 until 1963, when the passenger train was replaced by the
self-propelled Budd car.
The rail bridge allowed the Sault to be a stopover on CP's Chicago to Montreal passenger rail service in the early 1900s.
The service was disllowed during the First World War.
The rail bridge also allowed an entry point for cross-border passenger traffic in-and-out of Toronto, a
route which was canceled after the Second World War.
Passenger Service
CP canceled its daily passenger train service between the Sault and Sudbury in late 1963, claiming it was averaging only 41 passengers
a day, about half the passenger load of four years earlier, in 1959, and only about one-quarter of the 1963 passengers
were riding on a first-class ticket.
Some believe the decline in rail passengers was accelerated with the opening of the Sault Airport in 1961 - travelers preferring a
less than two-hour flight into Toronto instead of a 14-hour journey by rail.
The typical passenger train, including a locomotive, coach, dining car, sleeping car, and baggage car, was replaced by a stainless
steel Budd car which could accommodate up to 70 passengers.
The self-propelled Budd car, which picked up and dropped off passengers at several designated points along the Sault to
Sudbury corridor, was pulled off the tracks within 14 years and passenger service into Sudbury ceased in 1977.
CP again argued declining passengers volumes as the reason for abandoning passenger service altogether, claiming the Budd car was
averaging only 13.5 passengers throughout 1975, an increase of four passengers from 1972.
CP, which talked of the Budd car being a financial drain within six years of it entering service, in 1969, claimed a nearly $400,000
loss on the Sault-Sudbury run in 1975.
However an 80 percent federal government subsidy could reportedly be applied to the loss.
Within a decade of cancellation of the passenger service CP, as well as two contractors, had more than $40 million in legal claims
filed against them for the spraying of the controversial herbicide, Spike.
The herbicide had leached into the yards and basements of residents along the right-of-way near its rail yard.
Contractors sprayed the right-of-way in 1984 and again 1985 and high concentrations of the chemical found in 1987 led to
CP spending more than $2.5 million cleaning up its own rail yard as well as neighbouring properties.
More than a dozen families from the 600 block of Wellington Street East, as well as Lynn Road, were put up at the then Ramada Inn for
five months, August through December, as homes underwent industrial cleanings and properties were rebuilt from the bedrock up.
The city's Oakland Avenue train station, converted into an office in the early 1970s, about a decade after daily passenger train
service was demolished in the summer of 1994.
The Station
The station was witness to several historical moments but the building itself was not architecturally significant.
It had undergone significant change during its more than 100-year existence, so there was little public outcry about its
fate.
The station had welcomed royalty, including the British Duke of Connaught, Queen Victoria's third son, Arthur, as well as the Governor
General of Canada in August, 1912, followed by the Prince of Wales seven years later, in 1919.
The Prince of Wales was eventually King Edward VIII.
He abdicated his throne in late 1936 to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson, less than a year after the death of his father, King
George V.
The terminal was also the departure and welcome-home station for hundreds of area troops in both World Wars.
Dan Bellerose.
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