Lost Rails

By Vanda Schmockel ________________________________________________________________________________________

Don Smith runs his finger lightly along a railway map, tracing the line that used to run to his hometown of Mossbank. He says that it was a Canadian Northern rail line before it became Canadian National. Now, it’s not there at all.

“Our line came through Galilee, over here to Avonlea. And then went up to Moose Jaw.” His finger moves back and forth along the phantom line. “That’s all been taken out,” he said.

Smith, now in his 70s, fondly remembers a culture of rail travel in Canada. His father was the station agent for Mossbank, but also worked at other stations around Saskatchewan before his retirement in 1958. Smith still has the old wristwatch given to his father for his retirement, etched with a train engine on the back.

“My dad, he’d get a pass, and we’d travel for nothing,” he said. “We’d go to Chicago, Los Angeles, and B.C. And they had beautiful dining cars and everything. Silverware! Man, oh man. They used to have Trans-Canada service from eastern Canada to BC. They don’t have that anymore. It’s stupid. You go to Europe and they have train service everywhere – and fast. But we discontinued all that stuff.”

There’s no question that railway service in Saskatchewan is a husk of what it used to be. To compare a railway map from 1945 to a contemporary one is to watch a disappearing act, like looking at a ghost map written with invisible ink.   

George Wooldridge is a member of Transport Action Canada, an advocacy group that champions rail use across the country, and he shares Smith’s frustration.

“There was an incredibly extensive passenger train network from about the turn of the century to the late 1960s,” he said. “After that, it started getting cut back in fairly rapid progression, and it culminated, I would say, in about 1990 when Brian Mulroney decided that Regina, Moose Jaw, Swift Current, Calgary and a host of other cities across the CPR main line didn’t even deserve a passenger train. And he cut that link off.”

There was a time when it seemed as though every little hamlet in Saskatchewan had a train station. At one time, Mossbank had two railway stations - one to handle passengers and the other to handle freight. Now it has none. Its last railway station was demolished in 1977. Today, only a lone grain elevator belonging to RW Organic sits by the remaining CP railway line.

And now, yet another branch of track in Mossbank is to be abandoned. Canadian Pacific Rail says that a branch of the line that juts off roughly three kilometers south of the low, rolling landscape around Mossbank is no longer profitable and they want it off their hands.

Ron Wells is the CEO of RW Organic. If he and a group of other grain handlers and farmers have their way, that very stretch of track that runs north-west to Hodgeville, will soon be theirs; a short line railroad with a new lease on life and a new name to match: The Gravelbourg Hodgeville Rail (GHR).

The history of short rails in Saskatchewan isn’t a particularly long one. In the late ‘80s, the Government of Saskatchewan passed the Saskatchewan Railway Act, which created the climate for short rails in the province – an initiative to allow small groups to purchase abandoned branch lines from Canadian Pacific and Canadian National railways, primarily for the purpose of transporting grain. The first short line to run in Saskatchewan wasn’t too far from Mossbank. The Southern Rails Cooperative was launched in 1989 and continues to service farmers and grain handlers in nearby Avonlea and Briercrest.

At the moment, negotiations for the sale of the CP line to the GHR is under the advisement of the Canadian Transportation Agency, which is looking at setting a price for the track.

Price aside, another considerable concern for the future of the GHR is the potential dismantling of the Canadian Wheat Board. The CWB has a significant impact on the health of short line railways because it has the authority to allocate cars along the lines. Some, such as GHR chair Louis Stringer, are concerned that a lack of regulation will spell trouble for the GHR and other short lines.

“It’s nice to make pious statements that they’re going to preserve the producer cars, but how?” he asked. “Obviously, now the big companies are going to have that much more influence on how the cars are allocated. It used to be that the CWB would do a balancing act between the producer cars and the commercial cars. So now that’s going to be gone, what’s going to replace it?”

Wooldridge agrees, but is more optimistic about the future of short lines. He points to the Last Mountain Railway, a short line that runs between Regina and Davidson. Wooldridge wrote the feasibility study for the line, and largely credits local interest from smaller communities for its success.

“It was a pretty desperate situation at the time,” he said. “Again, it was strange how people reacted to trying to save what was, and is, basically the main railway between Regina and Saskatoon. We had allies in places we didn’t expect them to be.”

While the short lines are primarily meant to transport grain, Wooldridge can see a time when they might, at least partially, be turned over for some light passenger rail again – a use for the short lines that isn’t being exploited at the moment. He says that such use could be realized on the Last Mountain Railway, which meets up with the CN line running south from Saskatoon.

“I think it’s an almost ideal corridor for a higher speed train,” he said. “I think you could start by incrementally upgrading the existing track. (It) was used by passenger trains in the past, and it’s in fairly decent condition. You could basically run regional trains along it. You’d probably have to do some upgrades, but the cost of upgrading that track would be still far cheaper than, say, resurfacing a highway.”

Back in his living room, Don Smith is clicking through Google Earth to get an aerial view of this region that was once so well serviced by rail.

“We used to have two rail services to Moose Jaw – the CN and CP. You’d get on a day coach and you’d go to Moose Jaw and come back again.”

He continues to click away at his PC’s keyboard, seemingly a man from another time, rooted in the past. But his lament for the lost railways has never seemed more contemporary, a turn-of-the-last-century innovation, that’s long overdue for a revival.