Railway provided vital link for the North – by Karen Bachmann (Timmins Daily Press – March 30, 2012)

 The Daily Press is the city of Timmins broadsheet newspaper.

Karen Bachmann is the director/curator of the Timmins Museum and a local author.

HISTORY: More than one major mining discovery made while railroads were being build through Northern Ontario

In the past few years, we have been witness to some amazing changes in the field of mass transportation. The high-speed rail systems found in France can move people along the Paris-Lyon line at cruising speeds of 320 km/h hour. In Japan and Germany, the high-speed rail systems reach speeds of 300 km/h on regular routes.

The Airbus A380 (seating capacity 840) has forced airports around the world to renovate so that they can land the monstrosities (the aircraft amazingly measures seven stories high).

Cruise ships, on the other hand might as well be huge floating semi-independent countries. They are run just like small cities and have the same problems those cities face (3,400 people all sharing the same space).

All in all, I wouldn’t be too far off the mark if I said that transportation has evolved very rapidly in the past twenty-five years, and we are not finished yet.

Space travel is no longer the purview of NASA engineers and specialists. Virgin Galactic and the Russian Space Agency are actually acting on their promise of making space travel available to the “space tourist” (Ashton Kutcher being the latest pretentious soul, I mean passenger, to book on the flight).

While it’s interesting to look at where we are going, it is equally interesting to see where we’ve been. Even our modest transportation networks in Northern Ontario have yielded great things. If nothing else, they’ve allowed us (or our kin) to get here and make a living in these new communities.

Take the Ontario Northland Railway system, for example. It took some time to get things going. Tracks from the Canadian Pacific Railway, headed from Ottawa and Montreal, and very soon Toronto, converged at Callander in 1882.

The railway was pushing westward from this point and copper discoveries were made near Sudbury, urging prospectors to come up to the area and try their luck.

A prospectus was issued in 1884 urging the creation of a Nipissing and James Bay Railroad.

Others were adamant about a Sudbury line to the North. Both competing interests merged in 1897 and rail development was started in earnest in Northern Ontario.

In 1900, the settlers in the Temiskaming region were finally heard by the provincial government. Premier George Ross announced that the Province of Ontario would provide $40,000 for surveys and exploration of the lands between North Bay and New Liskeard.

By January of 1902, Frank Latchford, Commissioner of Public Works for the province announced that the route was selected for a railway that would link North Bay and the Clay Belt.

The lands in the area proved to be rich in timber and the ground around Lake Temiskaming was good for growing; perhaps the northlands could yield a few crops and help Ontario keep its thumb on New Ontario, as it would come to be known.

On May 10 of that year, the sod was tuned for the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway. While everyone was prepared that this colonizing railroad would incur a heavy deficit, no one thought that 110 miles of track in the bush would change the direction of this province.

That change of direction happened at Mile 103. Everyone sort of noticed the outcroppings along the route (how could you not when you were building a railway?), but no one really paid any attention to them.

Two tie contractors, J.J. McKinley and Ernest Darragh worked ahead of the line finding and cutting the necessary timber for the sleepers.

Growing tired of the monotony of their job, they decided, on a lark, to get information from the Department of Mines and start claim staking.

On August 30, 1903, they followed the “step-by-step” guide and staked a claim with a nice showing of some type of mineral.

They chipped a piece off and sent it on to a Montreal chemist to have it assayed. The results showed that the samples graded 4,000 ounces of silver to the ton.

While that little drama was being played out, Alfred Larose had his own bit of luck.

 While he was supposed to have discovered silver because of an ill-thrown hammer, his explanation was a little more mundane.

He noticed a piece of ore heavy with points and subsequently discovered the vein. He and his boss staked the two claims quickly and the rest, well, is Cobalt history.

That little piece of rail line up in the bush would uncover some of Canada’s richest mineral finds and start the true development of Northern Ontario.

Robert Surtees, in his excellent book “the Northern Connection” explains it like this: “The Whitney government turned for assistance to the one presence which it already had in New Ontario: the T&NO. The young railway, barely able to run its own trains became the principal government instrument for settling, developing and promoting the new society that was taking shape in the northeastern corridor.

“To assist it, the Commission received some extraordinary authority … over mining rights along the right-of-way, over several townsites along the line and over mining rights within those townsites. These were extraordinary powers but the circumstances were extraordinary.”

No wonder we here in Northeastern Ontario have an attachment to the ONTC!

And yes, I admit that I am a sucker for the romance of the railroad. I started taking the train to Toronto in the late 1980’s, when the sleeper service was still available. I hated to fly (and still do), so it seemed like a valid option, and I was proved right. Porters made up your bed while you had a decent meal in the café car; they woke you up with breakfast the next day – all so civilized.

The trains were old, I admit, but they certainly had character (Agatha Christie could have gathered inspiration on one of those trains!).

Yes, they were a bit slow, but they certainly afforded you a more humane way to travel.

The ONR was an important part of our heritage and to me, it remains a vital part of how we do business today.

Too bad this country is abandoning its rail lines when the rest of the world is embracing a safer and cheaper mode of rail transportation, both for passengers and freight.

Such is progress, I suppose.