COBOURG AND PETERBOROUGH
RAILWAY
A tiny settlement founded by United Empire Loyalists on the sh
Lake Ontario in the late 1790s, only thirty years later Cobourg w
thriving village on the verge of becoming a town. Among its lea.
citizens at that time was William Weller, owner of the famous R
Mail Coach Lines, who along with other progressively mindecL"
advocated a railway for Cobourg. r
.
Under one of the two earliest railway charters granted
Canada, the Cobourg Railroad Company was incorporated in 1834
power to construct a "double or single iron or wooden rail road" f.
Cobourg northward to Rice Lake. Although the provincial govern~'
generously pledged a subscription of £10,000 in the venture, promo~-~ ..,:.
were unable to raise sufficient capital. Consequently
the project w-,: .
shelved until 1846, at which time it was resurrected as the Cobourg and
Rice Lake Plank Road and Ferry Company. Built by Samuel Gor~, this
eleven-mile stretch of plank road barely survived the frosts of th'e first
two winters before it had to be abandoned.
Then came the Cobourg and Peterborough
Railway, incorporated in 1852. It turned out to be haunted by a series of misfortunes
right from the start. Following a portion of the old plank road, it ran to
Harwood, and headed via Tick Island across the widest part of Rice Lake
to Hiawatha and then on to Peterborough.
The first sod for the Cobourg and Peterborough was turned at
Cobourg on February 9, 1853. Before the rails reached the south shore of
Rice Lake, a cholera outbreak took a heavy toll among construction
workers, mostly German immigrants, who had been hired to work on the
line for a dollar a day.
The Rice Lake Bridge, although largely completed by the end
of 1853, was severely damaged by shoving ice that winter, and the
opening of the bridge had to be postponed until the following November.
A pile structure from Harwood to Tick Island, the bridge changed to
thirty-three 80-foot truss spans, with a 120-foot-long swing section in
the navigation channel, and continued to the north shore again as a pile
trestle. Ju<;t under three miles in length, it was likely the longest bridge
on the North American continent at the time but undoubtedly also one of
the most ill-fated. No sooner had trains begun to operate over the completed line to Peterborough, when on January 1, 1855 ice jams in the lake
pushed the north pile bridge towards the Peterborough shore, the truss
span towards Tick Island, and the southern trestle towards the Cobourg
shore. Near the island there was a gap of seven feet. Repairing and main~
taining the Rice Lake Bridge soon turned out to be considerably more of
a problem than its original construction.
.
To add to the railway's troubles, contractor Samuel Zimmerman demanded a price far in excess of his original estimate. At first he
refused to turn the road over to the company, but when the directors
eventually ran out of ready cash he let them have the line in a partially
completed condition. The sum of £10,000, borrowed by the railway from
the Marriage Licence Fund of Canada West, was merely a drop in the
bucket in trying to bring the road up '0 standard. Nearly every winter
the bridge was damaged and required extensive repairs; the line's
operating costs were staggering.
f
.
Although the Cobdurg-Peterborough
Railway contributed a
great deal to Peterborough's flourishing export trade, the town of Pe*;
borough had never invested a single cent in the enterprise nor did"'intend to come to the railway's rescue at any time. The fact was, Pet~
borough already possessed a perfectly reliable connection to ~
Ontario via the Port Hope, Lindsay and Beaverton Railway, which Wi.
\.
94
,_
f
not encumbered with such hazards as a flimsy railroad bridge most of
'ithe timeout of commission. Consequently Cobourgers alone ended up
{IPending nearly one million dollars on their troubled railroad which was
.:j\o more than thirty miles long. Their pride received another blow in the
fall of 1860, when the Prince of Wales~ who visited the area, was not
.permitted to cross Rice Lake on the infamous railway bridge.
.
During the following winter fate struck its mortal blow. The
bridge disintegrated and floated down the lake. There were those who
claimed that some extra help must have been supplied by agents of the
rival Port Hope Railway. In any event, the bridge was never again rebuilt, although plans for its reopening did not die for many years to
come.
In 1866 the company merged with the Marmora Iron Works
under the new corporate name of Cobourg, Peterborough and Marmora
Railway and Mining Company. The following year it opened a spur line
from the Trent River to the Marmora Iron Mines at Blairton. Ore shipments from the mines were transferred onto barges at the Trent River
and transported to Harwood, whence they continued by rail over the old
tracks to Cobourg. Traffic on the Blairton branch, however, came to a
halt in the late seventies when no more new ore deposits were found.
The long-abandoned
Rice Lake-Peterborough
section of the
road was leased to the Grand Junction Railway which required entry into
Peterborough,
and in 1886 the railway was sold to a Mr. Pearse.
Reorganized the following year as the Cobourg, Blairton and Marmora
Railway and Mining Company, the road eventually came under the
control of the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada.
MIDLAND RAILWAY OF CANADA
The Midland Railway of Canada evolved from the 1846 charter of the
Peterborough and Port Hope Railway Company which changed its name
in 1854 to the Port Hope, Lindsay and Beaverton. From 1869 on, it was
known as the Midland Railway of Canada. The Port Hope-Lindsay
section opened for traffic in December 1857, and a branch from Millbrook to Peterborough was built the following year. After the reorganization in 1869, construction continued and a branch was also built from
Peterborough to Lakefield. By 1879 the line was completed from Lindsay
via Beaverton and Orillia to Midland.
Under an agreement with the respective companies, signed in
1882, the Midland Railway of Canada and five lines adjacent to its
property were consolidated into one system to be known as the Midland
Railway of Canada. Involved in this merger with the Midland were the
i following
lines: the Toronto and Nipissing Railway; the Toronto and
iOttawa
Railway; the Whitby, Port Perry and Lindsay Railway; the
f . Victoria Railway and the Grand Junction Railway. The entire Midland
',lslstern
was leased to the Grand Trunk in 1884.
.
~. :;'~~.;f
.;;..'
.••.
E TORONTO
AND NIPISSING RAILWAY
. e Toronto and Nipissing Railway was incorporated in 1868 by William
derham, a prominent Toronto flour miller and distiller, who firmly
'eved that pioneer railways should be built in the most economical
nner. He therefore chose the narrow gauge of 3' 6" for his line, which
.,. ant a large comparative saving in construction
and maintenance.
enever he travelled over his railway, he instructed the engineer "to
w down the train" in order to minimize wear and tear on the light
-pound rails. His "colonization railway" into the Ontario Northland
owned in the beginning solely by its shareholders and borrowed no
'. ,ore money than was absolutely neces~ary. Gooderham wanted the
Toronto and Nipissing Railway: Locomotive Shedden, a double-header,
c.1870