(The following story by Gordon Jaremko appeared on The Edmonton Journal website on December 16.)
ABOARD ATHABASCA NORTHERN RAILWAY LOCOMOTIVE 610 — No stereo, snack stops, passing lanes or other breaks make the silent forest scroll by faster as this lone freight rolls south from Fort McMurray at a ponderous pace mostly below the speed limit in school zones.
Engineer Britt Jackson brightens his 12-hour shifts — which are sometimes too short to complete the 323-kilometre run to Lac La Biche on Athabasca Northern Railway (ANY) — by exercising his imagination.
Northern vistas, high oilsands expectations and knowledge that his 4,500-tonne train is only the tip of a freight iceberg inspire him. “The potential is enormous,” he says, reciting advantages of rail over road, multibillion-dollar Fort McMurray projects and astronomical possibilities for new cargo.
Such optimism is anything but idle engine cab talk by railway philosophers known in the trade as caboose lawyers, say Jackson’s employers. “This is the fastest growing railroad in North America as measured by percentage increase in business,” says ANY project development manager Bob Feeney. “It’s an exciting place to be.”
Successes by ANY and allied Lakeland & Waterways Railway, the southern leg of the 507-kilometre line between Edmonton and Fort McMurray, were the inspiration for the $2.6-billion blueprint proposed in September for a new northern rail and road network.
Seeds of the grand design — NEATCor, the Northeast Alberta Transportation Corporation — were planted when Feeney told the northern railway story to corporate Calgary at a transportation conference held 21 months ago by the Canada West Foundation. At the time, ANY and engineering house UMA Group had just generated a $250-million proposal to extend the tracks north into the oilsands mining area by building a colossal new rail and road bridge across the Athabasca River, as a locally desired industrial bypass route west of Fort McMurray.
Feeney recalls his message was, “It’s not an easy thing to do but close enough to justify. Of course we as a small company don’t have $250 million to do it.”
A senior Canadian Pacific Railway executive said “these are dreaming ideas.” But the northern vision caught the imagination of Jim Gray, an oil baron celebrated for thinking big who attended the meeting as a director of Canadian National Railway.
Gray teamed up with engineer Paul Giannelia, builder of the giant Confederation Bridge linking Prince Edward Island to mainland Canada, to form Athabasca Oil Sands Transportation Corp. as a vehicle for taking ANY’s northern growth ideas farther.
While CN also found the plan to be too big to tackle alone and preferred to focus on its main line, Gray and Giannelia persuaded Premier Ralph Klein and 18 companies to participate in a $2.5-million study that crafted the NEATCor proposal.
A target of Dec. 1, set for securing $300 million from the provincial government as the first step towards financing NEATCor then starting construction by mid-2005, passed in silence with no commitments made by any companies or Klein’s cabinet.
The plan is under discussion and no decisions will be made before January, said Janice Schroeder, an aide to newly appointed Economic Development Minister Clint Dunford. He, Gray and Giannelia could not be reached for further comment.
“It’s not the only solution,” Feeney says. One option would be to go back to the original bridge idea and drop the NEATCor grand design for a non-profit, independent transportation czar agency to take over all road and rail development in northeastern Alberta.
The options also include letting ANY and LW&R keep on growing gradually in stages that match regional demand for railway services. There is no shortage of improvements needed as the market expands, such as improving the rails on LW&R and stabilizing the ANY roadbed.
“That’s what we’re doing right now,” LW&R president Shawn Smith says. “We’re here to work with the system whatever way it does evolve.”
While still quiet by CN and CP standards, the Edmonton-Fort McMurray rail line of 2004 stands out as lively compared to its status as virtually extinct only seven years ago.
When the short-line specialists bought the northeastern Alberta route as a discarded CN spur in 1997, no train had run on it for four years.
The aging line, built in 1912, lost its last vestiges of a public profile in 1989 when CN dropped the Muskeg Special, a slow but colourful mixed passenger and freight train that linked Edmonton to villages of trappers between Lac La Biche and Fort McMurray.
The first anchor customer for the resurrected northern rail line was the Suncor oilsands plant, which had markets for petroleum coke and sulphur byproducts. Shipments were trucked two-thirds of the way to Edmonton while the disused northern track was restored.
More users stepped forward as the route came back to life. Wood products, led by Alberta Pacific Forest Industries Inc.’s pulp mill northwest of Boyle, grew into a mainstay. ANY fetches fresh logs from a northern depot at Conklin and LW&R takes finished products from the mills to CN’s Edmonton yard .
As partner lines of CN and each other, ANY and LW&R give “seamless service.” Shippers buy single transportation contracts. The railways co-operate on relaying loaded train cars to their destinations, and split the freight charges without dragging customers into complex booking and billing arrangements.
The Edmonton-Fort McMurray track was back in action in time to carry prefabricated plant parts north for the last round of oilsands project construction. At speeds restricted at times to a walk, deliveries for a Syncrude expansion included one of the heaviest trains ever assembled in North America.
The NEATCor scheme focuses on increasing northbound rail shipments in the next round of mega-mine development as a way to reduce highway truck traffic and hazardous congestion on roads in the Fort McMurray region.
But the northern railways say their bread and butter is southbound transportation of northern products in big volumes at reliably high frequencies. Recurring bulk shipments are their recipe for growth, rather than sporadic one-of-a-kind deliveries generated by temporary construction booms.
Coke, sulphur, logs, wood products and scrap metal dominate the freight. Loads of worn oilsands machinery headed south and new pieces going north at times lengthen the trains.
Traffic is growing, thanks partly to eagerness by small short-haul railways to attract shippers by catering to them. At Alpac, for instance, the railroaders look after all log “logistics” of unloading, stockpiling and keeping tabs on inventory and weights.
Only four years ago the ANY was a skeleton operation with just three locomotives, no rail cars of its own and one train a week.
The line currently has 14 engines, more than 100 cars, a new $1-million maintenance shop at Lac La Biche, and daily scheduled trains. Staff has doubled to 60 from 30. Total freight will exceed one million tonnes this year, up about five-fold since 2000.
Traffic on the LW&R’s southern leg of the Edmonton-Fort McMurray line jumped 40 per cent to 16,000 train car loads between 2000 and 2003, and preliminary figures for 2004 indicate the growth is continuing.
To pay for the $250-million plan for a new bridge past Fort McMurray into the oilsands mining region, Feeney said freight has to grow to three million tonnes per year. That means volume has to triple.
“But we more than did it already,” he pointed out.
“In the railroad industry growth goes in big steps. It’s either nothing or hundreds of car loads. It’s like an oilsands plant. You make your money over the long term. If you look at money in the short term, you’ll never build a railroad.”
While ANY 610 trundles through the frozen woods, its optimistic engineer points to a sure sign 40 kilometres south of Fort McMurray that freight traffic will keep growing.
The sights include a new 5.6-kilometre spur built to send prefabricated pieces into the $3.4-billion Long Lake oilsands project during construction, then eventually take out byproducts such as sulphur and specialty liquids.
From his engine cab, Jackson cheers on his employer’s expansion planning. “There’s no doubt in the world it would make money — a lot of money.”
He is echoed in the nearest inhabited spot to Long Lake, Anzac. The community this month celebrated completion of the Long Lake siding with a party on the first passenger coach seen in the area for 15 years, which the LW&R and ANY towed north for the occasion.