Happy New Year! Welcome to a very special Feature Friday.
On this day 110 years ago, the last spike was driven on the Canadian Northern Railway (CNoR) line between Sudbury and Port Arthur (Thunder Bay), Ontario. CNoR President William Mackenzie did the honours at 8am near the Little White Otter River, some 250 miles east of Port Arthur. The completion of these 550 miles of track between the end of steel at Ruel outside of Sudbury and Port Arthur was one of the final pieces in the building of Canadian Northern’s transcontinental network. It would take until October of 1915 for it to be fully opened to passenger traffic.
Unfortunately, only about two-thirds of this line is still active. The Canadian Northern company became insolvent not long after its transcontinental route was completed and was eventually taken over by the Canadian government and merged into the Canadian National Railways (CNR). In 1923, CNR completed the Nakina Cut-off, a 30-mile connection which joined the former CNoR line at Longuelac/Longlac with the more northerly National Transcontinental Railway at Nakina. This cut-off shortened the route between Toronto and Winnipeg by nearly 100 miles.
Everything on the old Canadian Northern line west of Longlac was no longer on the mainline and became a secondary line. From 1924 to 1960, it operated as two separate subdivisions, the Kinghorn and the Dorion. In 1960, CN merged the two into one subdivision, the Kinghorn, running 195 miles from Longlac to Port Arthur. The Kinghorn was decommissioned in 2005 and the rails were removed a few years later.
Poverty, Agony, Distress & Want! 