Journey to the end of the MM&A Railway line – by Les Perreaux (Globe and Mail – July 27, 2013)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

There is a sign marking the start of the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway line south of Montreal, but it’s hardly needed: Simply look for the piles of discarded track and cracked and rotting ties amid the ragweed, out past the point where the Canadian Pacific Railway ends in a well-groomed rail bed.

“I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had to call the city to get them to clean up their tracks,” says Amélie Gervais, the owner of Bistro La Trinquette in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que. Her quaint restaurant, with its vast courtyard patio, overlooks the Chambly Canal at the start of the MM&A line.

Railroads still count distances in miles, and Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu stands at what was once Mile 20 of the mighty Canadian Pacific Railway’s “short line” extension from Montreal to the Atlantic Ocean, which helped knit Canada from Pacific to Atlantic for 105 years.

Then, in the 1990s, the CPR effectively declared Montreal the end of the line, abandoning or selling almost everything to the east. Today, this is Mile 1 of the modest 510-mile network run by MM&A, the biggest of a series of a handful of operators keeping this route to New Brunswick alive.

People from here to Saint John, and Searsport, Me., have watched in horror as their rail-line neighbours in Lac-Mégantic await the chance to bury 47 dead from the crash of a runaway oil train July 6. This week The Globe and Mail travelled to stops along the line, finding towns united in mourning, but feelings about the tracks very mixed.

Canadian and U.S. government inspectors may have checked every inch in the past three weeks, but many people, especially in Quebec, still note obvious signs of disrepair. Others, especially in Maine, describe a plucky railway with limited resources and 170 employees struggling valiantly to maintain a vital link.

Not many would like to see the railway abandoned – they see the train as vital to keeping rare manufacturing jobs in their regions.

The most common sentiment is expressed by Maurice Bernier, the head of an economic development council in southern Quebec: “What matters to us is the future of rail, not the future of MM&A.”

That issue extends beyond this particular rail line. People may be angry with Edward Burkhardt, the bombastic head of the Chicago-based holding company that owns MM&A, but many would agree with his recent statement: “We all wish the national rail infrastructure was in better condition, but after years of starvation while nearly all government assistance has gone into highway development, this is quite representative of the thousands of miles of light-duty branch line in the U.S. and Canada.”

The capricious weather of recent months and years has served notice on the dangers of neglected infrastructure in general. But the recent centrality of oil transport to the rail business raises particular alarms.

For the rest of this article, click here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/journey-to-the-end-of-the-line/article13467471/?page=all#dashboard/follows/