Explore Regina: the city through a tourism lens

Fife Lake Railway: an auspicious development

(originally published in the Rural Councillor)

The real meaning of this summer’s official opening of the Fife Lake Railway is only beginning to emerge. In essence, a group of municipalities (5 rural and 2 urban) has banded together to save an important transportation artery in an under-serviced region. Extending over what used to be a CP-owned spur between Assiniboia and Coronach, the reinvented Fife Lake rail line creates new transportation options for local agricultural producers.

As the venture’s President David Marit puts it, “It is probably the best thing that could have happened for our communities and for everyone involved. We, ourselves, have a grain operation. Trucking costs today have just gone through the roof. Where I am, if we didn’t have the rail line, my shortest haul would be 40 mile long. Some people might ask: ‘what are the rural municipalities doing getting involved in railroads?’ I say: if the railway goes, we as producers in this part of the world have lost an option. For the price we pay for it, the municipalities will not loose money on it.”

The significance of the Fife Lake Railway development goes much beyond that, Marit goes on. “In Rockglen, when the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool decided to close many of its elevators and built the high throughputs, that community bought the elevator. When the CP had the line, producers had a hard time getting cars. Once it became a short line rail line, things changed. During the last year CP owned the line, that producer-owned elevator facility had 80 cars coming through. For comparison purposes, last year they had over 200 cars.”

In the world of large railway corporations where economies of scale often dictate how financial decisions are made, the interests of local producers and communities are often overlooked. Nothing beats local governance to foster a healthier rural economic climate. This is certainly how Marit sees it. And it’s only the beginning:

“We do have an economic development piece in the works stemming from this. It is a metakaolin plant—which will produce a type of clay used in cement—at Wood Mountain. They are going to haul their product to Scout Lake and put it on our line there. Whitemud resources out of Calgary is going to start constructing about a 20 or 30-million dollar plant 10 miles west of our rail line. It is nothing but good news. Our understanding is that in their fifth year of operation, they want to be at up to 1.3 million tons of product. That is a huge industry, even on the trucking side because it is not all going to go on rail. They are talking about 75 to 90 percent moving on rail and there still might be 25 to 10 percent moving by truck. That still employs a lot of people.”

The Fife Lake Railway team is pleased with the kind of economic activity that is being sustained and engendered as a result of Fife Lake Railway coming into being.

“Coronach is another example,” says Marit, “Pioneer is still there. We have a very good working relationship with them and they employ 7 or 8 people in that community—all young people between the ages of 20 and 40, with young families. If Pioneer was to close we would lose all those young people out of our community, so there is an element of self-preservation in this as well.”

It takes about an hour to drive along that whole stretch of line. The countryside is at its prettiest around this time of the year—I find—in that beautiful late afternoon low sunlight over the horizon. Of course, this is also the season when the antelope and whitetail deer all come out. Letting one’s eyes stray too far from the road and ditches does sometimes bring those unfortunate encounters with wildlife we all try to keep to a minimum. But I can’t help looking at how that railway line is imbedded in the landscape and within the towns along the way. We will never be able to put a dollar value on what a real “living” railway line is worth. Especially when your own sense of identify is somehow linked to having that rail line in there, where it has always been. David Marit sums it up nicely:

“All the communities on that line were built as a result of the railroad. Coming down here and seeing the trains being used weekly instead of seeing an abandoned rail line with no track is a huge aspect for our communities.”

Long live Fife Lake Railway! May this and our other short lines (and those who provide transportation services on them) help keep the fabric of rural Saskatchewan together for many years to come.

posted by Claude-Jean Harel, MA MAHI @ 4:09 PM