Virtual Railfan Tour - The Line to Churchill, Manitoba

Canadian National Passenger train for Churchill at Wabowden.

The line to Hudsons Bay was built to provide an additional port for prairie grain shipments which did not require the long land movements either through the west coast of BC or through Thunder Bay and the St. Lawrence. 

 

The original concept was for the shipping terminal to be located at Port Nelson and work was started there on the construction of a harbour as well as work on the line from Gillam.  However, in 1927, hydrological studies suggested that there would be difficulties for vessels to navigate as far as Port Nelson and the decision was taken to abandon Port Nelson and build anew at Churchill. This decision resulted in an abrupt curve at the then end of track and the line ran in a straight line, some 200 miles directly to Churchill.

I made the trip to Churchill a couple of times while working on grain transportation.

This was taken at the same time as the picture above, I think the dog adds to the interest.

There is not a great deal of interest to see at Churchill - other than polar bears which are mainly around the town dump in the winter season. However, there is one curiosity. This cairn contains the poem to the Sons of Martha by Rudyard Kipling. Ten sets of these poems were cast by Harry McLean of the Dominion Construction Company which built many lines. The cairns were put up at nine locations, mainly in eastern Canada where workers had been killed. However, Harry McLean did not build the line to Churchill although he did carry out the work on the line to Flin Flon, Manitoba.

There will be more about these cairns in a later blog. 

The first time I visited Churchill I returned south on a hy-rail car together with three members of the CNR engineering staff in Saskatoon. We were running on "line ups". The grain was quite heavy and we knew we were facing two northbound loaded trains. The "line up" only gave us the estimated time of departure of the trains from Gillam. We passed the first one alright.

The problem of running a hy-rail on this line was that there were no roads so no place where we could get out of the way of trains while sidings were few and far between. It was a gamble on where the second train would be and how far we could go and safely get out of its way.

There was an argument among the CNR men. The two junior men wanted to take a chance to get further south. However, the boss said "No, we will wait here". Thinking we were going to be in for a long wait we got put our sandwiches when along came the second train highballing as fast as he could go.  It was a good job we had stayed put.

The second journey I made to Churchill was on a special train organized by CNR to carry a group of permafrost experts, (including members from the then Soviet Union and China) to look at the permafrost problems on this line. The group also included Major Charles who built the line which reached Churchill in September 1929, He explained that the problems were fortunately minimized by the fact that the last part of the line was laid over the frozen, icy ground in winter so the sub strata was not disturbed. 

This line is amazing. As we ran north in a straight line after the last curve the vegetation became shorter and shorter until we were travelling through "the land of the little sticks" where the trees were about six inches tall. After that there was little or no vegetation at all.

On the way back we were treated to a display of what havoc the ice could make.  The ride was quite smooth but we were suddenly treated to a heavy brake application followed by a very loud bang and the car lurched badly. The train was immediately stopped and we got out to see what had happened.

This is what we saw:

The entire train had gone over this rail break.

Although the line had been inspected that morning the ice pressure around a small culvert had been enough to break this rail. The only good thing about this was that we had travelled over it from the high side to the low side. If we had been travelling in the opposite direction there would have been a terrible derailment. 

The line to Churchill is unique in many ways!