Railway revival   (Page 1 of 6)

Are Canada’s railways poised for a second golden age?

By Monte Paulsen with photography by Tobin Grimshaw

Photo: Tobin Grimshaw

FERNIE, B.C. — Fire dances on the tracks. Snow drifts from the sky. Wisps of black smoke swirl around a man swinging a sledgehammer at a stubborn bolt. The rhythm of metal striking metal rings over the whispers of crackling flames.

Click map to enlarge

Trace the author’s journey. Click the map for the full version. (Map: Steven Fick/Canadian Geographic)

The damaged bolt springs loose and is quickly replaced. The track crew pick up their tools and extinguish the kerosene fire they’d lit to expand the cold steel rail. They move their truck and radio to rail-traffic control to release the track.

I hear the engine approach before I see it. A moment later, its headlight cuts through the fog and a big red locomotive looms into view. Engineer Waldy Matyjaszyk brings the train to a stop and waves me aboard. I climb a steep ladder and duck through a heavy steel door into the cab of a Canadian Pacific (CP) locomotive. It is the first in a series of freight and passenger trains I will ride from coast to coast in an expedition to take stock of Canada’s rail industry.

Matyjaszyk resets the throttle, and the engine roars to life, jerking forward as it pulls the slack out from between each of the 115 coal cars behind us. It feels as if we’re pulling the kinks out of a mile-long Slinky.

Deer leap from the snow-covered tracks as we gain speed. My mind leaps, too, as the train click-clacks forward. I recall a grainy black-and-white photograph of men in top hats driving the last spike at Craigellachie, B.C. I hear Gordon Lightfoot singing about “an iron road running from the sea to the sea.” And I smell the paste of schoolroom dioramas about “The Wedding Band of Confederation.”

An inhuman voice yanks me from my cheesy revelry. “CP detector,” it squawks over the radio, “472 axles, no alarms.”

We had passed a “hot box” as we left Fernie, explains Matyjaszyk. The trackside instrument had measured the temperature of the joint bearings in the train’s axles. Overheated bearings can lead to equipment failure. Once the detector tabulated the data, a computer-generated voice parroted it back to the locomotive.

Wearing Carhartt coveralls and a blue cotton work shirt, Matyjaszyk looks like I expected a veteran engineer to look. But the cockpit that surrounds him sports none of the oversized dials and brass handles seen in movies and museums. Rather, he controls the train via a joystick-like throttle mounted before a pair of computer screens. Columns of data display the performance not only of this locomotive but also of two remote-controlled engines far behind us — one pushing from the centre of the train and another from the rear. In this collision between expectation and reality lay a lesson I would learn repeatedly throughout an odyssey that stretched across eight provinces: with computer-laden trains driven over high-tech tracks, today’s Canadian railways bear little resemblance to their iconic history.

Canada’s privately operated freight network is among the world’s best. The nation’s 45,000 kilometres of freight track convey grain, oil, coal, forest products and nearly everything else Canada produces to ports such as Vancouver and Montréal. On the return trip, these rails carry nearly everything we consume — from apples to automobiles — to within a few hundred kilometres of our local stores. Altogether, railways carry two-thirds of all surface freight in Canada. And the nation’s two Class 1 (or high-revenue) freight railways are industry leaders: the Canadian National Railway Company (CN) is the most fuel-efficient in North America and over the past decade or so CP has boasted the best safety record.

Canada’s publicly supported passenger systems, meanwhile, carry more than 77 million riders per year on 16,000 kilometres of track. The double-decker trains built by Bombardier in cooperation with Toronto’s GO Transit have been purchased by a dozen other commuter systems in North America. Montréal’s Agence métropolitaine de transport is growing at 10 percent per year. And VIA Rail Canada is aggressively improving service between Toronto and Montréal.

Impressive achievements all. But like a locomotive emerging from the fog, Canada’s 21st-century railway renaissance remains obscured by its 19th-century legends. This dispatch is an attempt to separate past from present and, like glances from a moving train, provide a glimpse into the future of Canadian rail.

FORT STEELE, B.C. — Bison graze alongside the yard office, a modular building on the outskirts of town. They take no notice of the coal train lumbering by their pasture.

Fort Steele is the dividing point between two sections of track called “subdivisions.” These sections were initially created to resupply steam engines with water and coal. Today, they serve primarily as crew-change locations. Engineer Mark Barrett and conductor Jeff Campbell took command at Fort Steele and are driving the train north to Golden. This train was loaded at the Elk Valley mine. CP built the mine and operated it for more than a century. But the company spun off its mines, ships, hotels and other businesses in 2001 to refocus on the railway.

Coal is a commodity. It fetches pretty much the same price no matter where it’s sold. But while Canada’s coal must be hauled over the Rockies to the sea, coal from competing producers in countries such as Australia is mined within 150 kilometres of tidewater. As markets globalized, Canadian railways were challenged to deliver such commodities as coal, grain, potash and forest products much more efficiently.

This is the business problem that pushed Canadian railways into becoming the most cost-efficient in North America. It helped spur advancements such as diesel-electric locomotives that deliver more power while burning less fuel and on-board computers that advise engineers on fuel use. Working from a detailed GPS-based model of the track ahead, these systems calculate the minimum amount of power required to pull a specific train over a particular section of track. “Sometimes,” says Barrett, “I’ll coast for miles.”

The practice of placing remote-controlled locomotives at up to five positions on the train — distributed power — has improved handling and performance and made longer trains possible. Computer models are used to calculate the most efficient way to build commodity trains that can be more than 2,100 metres and container-carting intermodal trains that can stretch to 4,270 metres. “It’s like driving a set of short trains strung together,” says Barrett, who, with 31 years of experience at CP, has witnessed many of these changes first-hand.