Where Did All the Trains Go?

Ain't she pretty? I wanted to climb
up on it for a picture but tetanus is
a very real thing.

A couple days ago I went to Carbonear. My sister's beginning a program in a college out that way, so I figured

we could go map out the area and all that. As we prepared to turn the corner to the college, I saw this massive, rusted out train. This got me thinking, what happened to the trains of Newfoundland? I know that we had trains back in the day as lots of great berry picking routes cross 'train tracks' (meaning where the train tracks used to be).

The logo of Newfoundland Railway. It was absorbed
by the Canadian National Railway Company, who's
logo you can see in the first picture painted on the
train itself.

The railroads of Newfoundland were built in 1898 and stretched across the island in order to make travel and the transportation of goods easier. The Newfoundland Railway was in operation until 1949 when Newfoundland joined Confederation and they were absorbed by the Canadian National Railway Company. The trains continued to operate across Newfoundland until 1988, when they were officially abandoned and mostly removed.

I remember my parents telling me about when they were younger and how they would travel on the trains and how much they enjoyed it, so this makes me wonder why it was closed down. The Trans-Canada Highway was finished being built in Newfoundland towards the end of 1965, making travel across the island much more efficient for those travelling by automobile or for shipping products, eliminating much of the demand for the trains.

I didn't have a tape measure handy so I used my key lanyard
for reference in this photo. The tracks are actually quite narrow.

Another factor to it's decline was the refusal to expand their track gauge. Newfoundland's tracks were 3'6" across, making them rather narrow, as you can see in the image here. Canada's standard track gauge is 4'8.5", making them significantly wider and thus significantly safer as well as more efficient as they can contain more. Since Newfoundland is so large with such little population, the cost to have to tear up all of their pre-exisiting tracks in order to put down new ones was too much to pay. The cost of building the Trans-Canada Highway was hard on Newfoundlanders as we have the second longest amount of highway per province (behind Ottawa) in one of the roughest terrains (the only real competition for that is maybe British Columbia) with one of the fewest amounts of people to divide it between (a population of roughly 455,000 people when they began construction of the TCH) so to do that on top of the expansion of their railroads was too much. They decided to declare the railroad officially obsolete and retire the trains.

I love that they still have some of
the train tracks still down.

Several train cars can still be found around the island. Three that I know of and got to see personally were in St. John's, Carbonear, and Whitbourne, but I'm sure there must be more across the island, these are just the three I had the opportunity to see in person. If you want to learn more, there's an awesome train museum in Whitbourne as well as a massive train museum in St. John's that is actually built in the old St. John's Train Station, so it's like a three-for-one deal: a historical train building full of historical train facts next to a historical train car.