Rails to the Atlantic. Ron Brown
Railway came under the Canadian National Railway system, which also operated the ferry links to the mainland. As usual, the beginning of the end of rails on the Rock came with the arrival of improved roads, in particular the completion of the Trans-Canada Highway in 1965. Within four years rail passenger service had ended. Onerous rate increases approved by the CTC (Canadian Transportation Commission) ultimately doomed freight service as well, and in September of 1988 Newfoundland’s last train squealed to a halt in Port aux Basques. As in Prince Edward Island, the Rock was yet another province with no rail service.
Quebec’s mineral resources drew new rail lines in the 1950s, with the CNR adding a loop from Saint-Félicien in the east, northwesterly to Chibougamau, and then on to rejoin the CN line at Barraute west of Senneterre. Independent from Canada’s rail network and its main rail lines, the Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railway, in 1954, extended a 480 kilometre rail line from the port of Sept-Îles on the north shore of the St. Lawrence to haul iron ore from Labrador City and Schefferville. Most of the line continues to operate and offers limited passenger service to this day.
By the 1980s most of the local rail lines were gone. Much of the spider’s web of lines through southern Quebec was abandoned and the rails ripped up. The provincial lines in both Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland were gone by the late 1980s.
When the CNR and the CPR decided that they no longer wished to operate passenger service on the remaining lines, VIA Rail came into existence. But it fared little better, especially in the face of hostile federal governments, both Liberal and Conservative, who discontinued the majority of its early routes. Many of its remaining routes remain underfunded and in jeopardy.
By 2015 much of eastern Canada’s railway legacy was little more than a memory. Stations have been removed and roundhouses razed, leaving little evidence that the rail era even existed. However, thanks to dedicated heritage lovers, what remains of that era is now celebrated through museums, tour trains, and groomed cycling paths on the old rail lines. As well, there remain a number of railway hotels that give tourists and enthusiasts a chance to explore the very towns that the railways themselves brought to life.
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Bridging the Gap: The Trestles and Tunnels of Eastern Canada
Think of railway bridges and one immediately conjures the vast chasms and looming mountains that railway structural engineers had to overcome in western Canada’s mountains and the Prairies’ wide valleys. But some of Canada’s longest and most unusual railway bridges span the chasms and canyons of Quebec and the Atlantic provinces.
Railway engineers first built their bridges almost exclusively of wood. It was plentiful, after all, and easy to assemble. But as trains became heavier — and since wood was flammable — the use of iron and steel began to seem like a better idea. In the mid to late 1800s, a number of bridge designers came up with increasingly stronger types of bridge construction.
Truss bridges (a structure whose strength lies in the criss-crossing of lengths of wood, and later iron and steel) can be attributed to William Howe’s railway bridges, built in the United States in the 1840s. Howe worked primarily with wooden structures. Squire Whipple of Utica, New York, created the first iron truss railway bridge in 1846. These gave way to increasingly stronger bridge styles from bridge engineers like James Pratt and Thomas Warren. Terms like deck truss refer to trusses that are situated below the tracks, while a through truss lies above the tracks. An arched or bowstring truss simply refers to a bow shaped top row of steel beams. Piers were initially constructed of stone upon which decks (pre-manufactured sections of track) were placed. Bents refer to the long steel structures that support the tracks used usually in higher trestle bridges. As construction progressed, the preference for steel over iron led to bridges so durable that many remain in use today.
A cantilever bridge’s main support extends from the ends of the structure, rather than resting on piers. They were rare in eastern Canada; however, the cantilever bridge crossing the St. Lawrence River at Quebec City is North America’s longest.
The Bridges of Quebec
Montreal
Because the city sits on a large island in one of the world’s largest rivers, Montreal is surrounded by bridges, among them the world’s greatest feats of engineering.
To the west there lie the two branches of the Ottawa River, which swirl around each side of Île Perrot. As the Grand Trunk Railway (GTR) made its way westward in the 1850s, sturdy bridges to cross these two wide waterways were needed. The bridges at Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue and the one linking Île Perrot to Vaudreuil were completed in 1854. Designed by the firm Stephenson and Ross, the Peto Brassey Betts and Jordan Company finished the project. The bridges’ sixteen piers incorporated upstream cutwaters to reduce the impact by ice floes.
The Canada Atlantic Railway erected a major bridge over the St. Lawrence River east of Montreal, a portion of which crosses the ruins of a Lachine Canal lock.
The GTR initially built a tubular structure on these bridges — making them, in effect, an enclosed tunnel. That, however, proved unfeasible for a number of reasons: the bridges could not be widened to accommodate planned double tracking, the sides often caught strong gusts of wind, and the long enclosed tubes trapped smoke, making life unbearable for passengers. Finally, in 1898, the tube was replaced with an open steel deck on a row of stone piers.
Mere metres away from the GTR bridge stands the CPR bridge that was built for its main line in the 1880s. The CPR bridge uses a different style — four arched through trusses made of steel on top of a row of stone piers. These historic bridges are best viewed from the Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue Canal National Historic Site in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, over which both bridges cross.
In 1887 the CPR kept on building, adding its Short Line, from Montreal to Saint John, New Brunswick, to access the year-round port facilities. It crossed the St. Lawrence with its Lasalle Bridge. The first bridge built was a combined truss and box span. In 1908 that bridge was replaced in order to accommodate double tracking. Today’s bridge uses steel deck girders and deck trusses supported on stone piers. A lift bridge over the St. Lawrence Seaway on the south shore lifts the bridge to allow the massive ocean freighters to glide by below. A small fading wooden plaque on Boulevard Lasalle in Parc Saint-Ange near the Lasalle commuter station describes the heritage of the site.
A short distance west of Sainte-Anne, the Canada Atlantic Railway (CAR) constructed a massive bridge over the St. Lawrence River in 1897, linking Valleyfield with Les Coteaux. The CAR was an ambitious project, built by Ottawa lumber baron J.R. Booth, to link the Georgian Bay port of Depot Harbour in Ontario with the Atlantic seaboard. It was opened in 1897. From Valleyfield, a one-time busy railway town and now a Montreal suburb, nine through-truss spans cross the first section of water to Île Longueil, from there four more spans link to Île aux Chats, and finally four more to Île D’Adoncourt. These structures, however, are difficult to view from anywhere but the water, and passenger trains no longer cross them. The most interesting and photogenic view from land rests in a small park in Les Coteaux, where a single-span truss carries the tracks over a crumbling abandoned lock on the old Lachine Canal.
Carrying the CNR over the Rivière-des-Prairies just beyond the Pointe-aux-Trembles station northeast of Montreal are two impressive trestles of over 350 metres and 290 metres respectively, separated by Île Boudan, with a combined total of thirteen through-arch truss spans.
But perhaps the most famous of Montreal’s bridges is the Victoria Bridge. Throughout the 1850s railway building was frenzied. Tracks radiated from the south shore of the St. Lawrence, while Montreal, across the wide river, was fast becoming a transportation and commercial hub. Ferrying trains across the river or by winter rails on the ice was cumbersome and uneconomical. A permanent bridge from Montreal over the river was essential for trains to access the rails that linked with the Atlantic ports. And so, in 1853, the GTR hired one of the continent’s most revered bridge engineers, Robert Stephenson, to come up with the impossible: a bridge over the St. Lawrence, some 2.5 kilometres across. Three thousand workers picked up their tools and started