Last Train by the Station

In 2001, Canadian Pacific, the City of North Bay, and the Ottawa Valley Railway undertook a yard rationalization project which would see the old CP station in North Bay and a sizable portion of the CP rail lands released to the City for future development. The City paid for everything including the redesign and reconstruction of a smaller yard as well as building a new office building for the OVR. As part of the yard redesign, the original main line running by the station was relocated towards the lakeshore in the hopes that the redeveloped lands would not be separated from the City by a rail line. As it turned out, the commercial development never happened and the lands are now largely being redeveloped as a park. In hindsight, had everyone known this was going to happen, it would probably have been better to leave the main line where it was so that the park would not be separated from the lakeshore by a rail line!!

Anyway, there was a lot of activity in North Bay Yard that summer culminating in a final crew change ceremony in front of the old CP station on September 29th. To start the ceremony we pushed the T&NO #503 up to the station

for display. After that we used the CP track geometry train (which conveniently happened to be in town), a retired CP crew, and a working OVR crew to do the ceremonial crew change. Following the crew change,

we had retired CP Roadmaster Armand Huard pull a spike in front of the station to officially close the track. We then had Armand drive a last spike in the new main line and unveiled station name sign "Huard" at the new relocated terminus of the North Bay Subdivision and start of the Cartier Subdivision. It was quite a day, enjoyed by all.

Although the ceremony was on the 29th, the true last train to run by the North Bay station on the original mainline alignment was CP train 211 on October 1. There was no fanfare that day, but knowing that it would be a bit

of a historic event, I grabbed my camcorder and filmed the train as it pulled by the station for the last time. 211 that day wasn't the prettiest train that CP had ever thrown together, but it was a whopper and took a full 10 minutes to pass by, probably in the order of 8,000 feet in length.