The Thurso & Nation Valley Railway

The Thurso & Nation Valley Railway was eastern North America's last logging railroad, ending service in 1986. It connected Thurso, QC with points north, with a 56 mile main line with many branches, as was common with logging lines.

Thurso & Nation Valley 10 GE 50 ton Thurso September 1979. Phtotographer: Bob Heathorn. Image via TrainWeb


First surveyed in 1921, the difficult terrain took several years to fully construct, with many unforeseen obstacles along the way.

Thurso & Nation Valley Railway Map

It faced road competition as early as the 1950's, like every other short line and/or logging railway of the day, but nonetheless it persisted despite economic downturns occasionally closing the line temporarily.

"The TNVR was discovered by railfans in the late 1960s and a number of excursions were run by the Bytown Railway Society, a group of railway enthusiasts located in the Ottawa area." (Churcher)



But by 1986, operations began to cut back, ending service along the northernmost points of the line, until finally closing in September.

The only part of the line remaining in service is a small switching operation near the logging mill at Thurso.



Thanks as always for reading!

Location: Thurso, QC, Canada

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Choum Tunnel: The Monument to European Stupidity in Africa

Image
Scars of European colonization are located all across Africa, although some are more obscure and strange than others. With that in mind we come to the Choum Tunnel , built in Mauritania when it was controlled by the French. At first glance, it seems like an ordinary railway tunnel, however, one look at the local geography and you'll find yourself asking what its builders were possibly thinking with creating the project. Choum Tunnel in Mauritania. Unknown photographer. The Mauritania Railway was being built in the early 1960s, and was planned to connect Nouadhibou to Zouérat to exploit the iron ore reserves at Zouérat. That route still exists today in largely its original state, with the exception of the tunnel. Image: Ammar Hassan via Atlas Obscura The easiest route required running a short section of track through the then-Spanish controlled Western Sahara , but rather than pay Spain for the land and other concessions, the French engineers instead chose to tunnel under a hill sp
Read more

Railroad Vocabulary: A List of Words and Phrases Used in the Industry - Updated February 2024

Image
As somebody who enjoyed watching trains, but was not an employee of the railroad industry ( at least growing up ), when I would interact with railfans and historians, there was often a lot of technical jargon that applied only to the railroad industry thrown back and forth that made it difficult for a newcomer to understand what they were talking about. For example, what is a dinky? It's actually a passenger train. This non-inclusive language seems to keep the loop closed to members of the community, and to uncouple (no pun intended) that technical jargon and help make it easier for people to communicate with people in the industry, I am creating a list of railroad vocabulary that I'm hoping will make the industry more transparent.  BNSF 2361 . Image: Matt Flores While I ultimately believe that such technical jargon has no place outside of perhaps technical communications between employees, I know quite well that I alone am not going to stop people from communicating in a non-i
Read more

We asked ChatGPT to write an article on Abandoned Railroads - Here's the Result

Image
We live in an incredibly interesting age of information - made even more interesting by one of the most advanced chatbots that exist. Chatbots have been around for awhile now, but there are very few that have captured the amount of information and artificial intelligence that have been shown by ChatGPT . To demonstrate this, I asked it to write me an article on abandoned railroads with 1200 words in it. After this paragraph, you'll see what ChatGPT wrote. I will provide relevant links in its paragraphs and make any errors that I can see in brackets "[]". What I've noticed is that ChatGPT is great when it comes to general ideas about a particular historical topic, but largely gets facts, dates, and context wrong. Thus, we're still a little ways away from being taken over by computer overlords . Otherwise, thanks as always for reading my material, the rest is by guest blogger ChatGPT! Abandoned railroads are railways that are no longer in use or service. This can ha
Read more