Cobourg and Peterborough Railway

Cobourg and Peterborough Railway
Locale	Ontario, Canada
Dates of operation	1834–1850
Track gauge	4 ft 8 1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) (standard gauge)
Headquarters	Cobourg, Ontario

The Cobourg and Peterborough Railway was one of the first rail lines to be built in Central Ontario, Canada, having been founded in 1834 as the Cobourg Railway Company. The line was proposed to extend from Cobourg to Peterborough, though plans for construction were constantly put on hold or shelved until 1846, particularly due to the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837^[1]. The railroad was finally constructed as the "Cobourg and Rice Lake Plank Road and Ferry Company" by Samuel Gore and was 17 km in length, reaching the shores of Rice Lake, but the railway barely survived the first two winters it faced. The Cobourg and Rice Lake Plank Road and Ferry Company was fairly successful, using a plank road and ferry to cross Rice Lake, delivering lumber from the newly-founded town of Peterborough to the port in Cobourg, but ran into financial difficulties.

The wooden causeway

The Cobourg and Peterborough Railway was the successor company that was incorporated in 1852, and had the railroad extended along a 5-kilometer (3.1 mi) single-tracked wooden trestle bridge across Rice Lake. Construction started in 1853, but was halted due to a cholera epidemic among the German immigrants who signed up to work at the construction sites. The bridge was constructed in the summer of 1854, was completed on November 19, and, opened for use on December 29, 1854. At the time, it was one of the longest trestle bridges in North America. The main bridge started in Harwood, Ontario and continued towards Tic Island, and consisted of a long trestle set on piles, with 33 truss spans (24 m each) and a 36 m swing section in the navigation between Tic island and the northern shore. The choice for using pure wood on the bridge was its low cost, and high abundance in nearby forests.

The railroad company did have one spur line at the time: the Peterborough & Chemong Lake Railway Company. This was established as an eventual extension of the Cobourg & Peterborough in 1857, while the first four miles (six kilometers) opened in 1859. The line was taken over by the GTR in March 1888 and extended the line the remaining four miles by July 1891.

Each year, massive ice dams would form on Rice Lake, and extensive repairs were needed to keep the bridge safe and operational. The bridge was even more vulnerable due to the construction contractors using simple wooden pilings instead of using crushed rock surrounding the wooden piles, which allowed them to shift when ice dammed up against the bridge, warping them. When the Prince of Wales visited in 1860, he was not allowed to cross the bridge due to fears it would collapse. By the winter of 1860–1861, the bridge was completely destroyed, along with the town of Cobourg's hopes of becoming a major Great Lakes port, and the rails were removed from the remaining portions of the bridge. The railroad had gone bankrupt in 1865. The town's citizens had raised over $1 million for the 48 kilometer long railroad, which was later merged into the Marmora Ironworks in August 1866.

The Americans intervene, and Grand Trunk Takes Over

After the bridge had collapsed, a group of United States investors of the Port Hope, Lindsay, and Beaverton Railway bought remaining portion of the rail line, and the Marmora Iron Mine, and renamed it the Cobourg, Peterborough & Marmora Railway & Mining Company in 1867. The railway would later get an extension to Trent Narrows on the Trent River, and further north to the iron mine in Blairton, while barges would load the coal from the trains onto the Trent River, and sail down the river and Rice Lake to the port at Harwood, where they would continue their journey to Cobourg. This would be moderately successful, until the economic crisis of 1873 that struck North America. While the town of Cobourg continued to pressure Peterborough to help it rebuild the Rice lake trestle bridge after 1873, Peterborough was reluctant to do so, due to having other railroad projects to attend to. The CP&MR&MC would later go bankrupt in 1880. This would not be the end of the railroad, yet.

In 1885, a Belleville business man purchased the railroad company for $30,000, and renamed it the Cobourg, Blairton & Marmora Railway & Mining Company. The company quickly found itself in financial distress from a lack of investment, from depletion of the forests nearby, and the depletion of the iron mine near Blairton and Havelock. In 1893, the railroad's (and town of Cobourg's) suffering was ended when the railroad was merged with the Grand Trunk Railway, now today's Canadian National Railway. Grand Trunk Railway may have purchased the Cobourg railway to gain access to its harbour, as it did not have any previous track leasage or ports there, and used its rail link to Harwood on rare occasions until the early 1910s. With the start of World War I in 1914, this stretch of railroad was torn up, and the rails were transferred overseas to be used in France.

When the Trent-Severn Waterway was constructed in 1920, the lake was flooded, and the land causeway that was formed along the collapsed bridge was submerged. The rails to the Cobourg harbour were removed in the 1980s.

Today

Today, very little evidence remains of a railroad linking Blairton, Harwood, Peterborough, and Cobourg, as vegetation is reclaiming the former railbed, and erosion is eliminating its evidence.

One portion of the bridge remains, stretching from the south shore of Rice Lake at Harwood, to Tic Island, while the other portions have since been washed ashore and removed, or sunk to the bottom. It appears as a land causeway, with trees and bushes growing on it.

References

1. ^ "Destiny Derailed: A History of Cobourg's Railroads 1833-1893". Steampower Publishing. http://www.canrailpub.com/candp.htm. Retrieved 2008-08-06. 

External links

• Cobourg and Peterborough Railway at CobourgHistory.ca
• Cobourg and Peterborough Railway at TheCanadianEncyclopedia.com
• The Cobourg and Peterborough Railway history by Daniel Dixon
• The Cobourg & Peterborough Railway Company at The Ontario Railway History Page
• Destiny Derailed: A History of Cobourg's Railroads 1833-1893
• Capsule Railway History of Peterborough County
• HarwoodMuseum.ca