One of Parry Sound’s great pleasures of recent years has been a walk along the fitness trail, with the Big Sound sparkling just yards away in the summer sun, families and dogs passing by, and chance encounters with friends around every corner.
Its name suggests physical fitness, but a jaunt on this wandering shoreline path also offers an element of spiritual well-being, giving an up-close encounter with nature in the midst of an urban environment.
The scenic walkway of crushed feldspar, a form of pink granite, also offers a step into the past, turning the pages of time back to an important chapter of Parry Sound’s history. It is a chapter that comes alive because, on the fitness trail, history is not merely something in a book, but something you are actually standing on.
What we now know as the fitness trail actually occupies the roadbed of a railway spur that serviced the harbour area in the days before trucks, when the community depended on either water or rail transport, or sometimes both. And more than a few of us still remember a little tea-kettle of a locomotive pushing a cut of freight cars along where the trail now lies.
Ample evidence of the fitness trail’s railway past can still be observed. By the old Town Beach is a timber trestle bridge and just north of it, is a rock cutting to allow the rail line through a hard granite knoll. A bridge remains across the Seguin River, although the Trail has been re-aligned at its approach so as not to interfere with the operations of the Home Building Centre. Beyond the northern end of the trail is another rock cutting, running along the back of Kristen Heights.
Without realizing it, many of us walk the fitness trail in innocent oblivion of what it used to be in the chapters of Parry Sound’s railway history. So we’re going to travel the fitness trail in these pages – but not on foot.
One of the best parts of being a writer is the capacity to turn back time and return long-gone settings to life – which is exactly what we’re going to do now. We’ll peel away 531 pages of the calendar and score ourselves a ride in one of the little locomotives that serviced the old harbour spur line. In fact, maybe we can arrange a second ride, but we shall see. So relax, enjoy the experience, and travel easy through our story.
All aboard
It is a bright, sunny morning in June, 1953. Branch-line railroading, even on as august a system as the Canadian Pacific Railway, is a pretty informal matter, and sometimes a cab ride can be had for the asking without having to sign all sorts of waivers, for this is in an era before folks watched their rear-view mirrors for a pursuing lawsuit. We have, however, “gone through channels”, a locomotive ride has been approved by a major-domo in MacTier, and our steed is waiting for us at the C.P.R. station. She is No. 3607, a 1925 graduate of the Montreal Locomotive Works, and is what we call a Consolidation type, meaning that she has two pony wheels, eight drivers, and no trailing wheels. No speed demon is No. 3607, but she certainly has the torque for heavy freight and steep grades.
No. 3607 has just taken coal from a home-made timber crane on a siding just north of the station and now waits both for us and for the 11:20 arrival of train No. 26, a southbound passenger local for Toronto, for, until it has passed, No. 3607 has to stay clear of the main line. Train No. 26 comes and goes, picking up some passengers and assorted mail and express, and now it’s time for No. 3607 to go to work on what years later would be known as the fitness trail.
Two flat cars of lumber for Beaver Lumber and six empty tank cars for the tank farm by the harbour have been left off by a northbound freight earlier in the day. With the obligatory huffing and clanking, No. 3607 rounds them up and then cools her wheels, waiting for a southbound freight with three loads of coal for the Beatty Coal Company. The freight train shows up about a half-hour later, cutting off the coal cars, and continuing on its way over the high bridge. No. 3607 couples the coal cars onto the end of her little train and, rolling in reverse, tows it northwards somewhat past the Isabella Street crossing, and then takes a quick breather while the brakeman sets the switch for the line to the harbour. We move off the main line and pause again while the brakeman re-sets the switch and then joins us in the hot, cramped cab.
Cautiously, our inverted train, now being pushed, cruises gently through the rock cutting where Kristen Heights is now, and then down a quite steep grade to the Salt Dock, where the Big Sound shimmers off to our right. Through another cutting, now, overhanging trees undulate from the engine’s gentle exhaust, rather like the palm fronds in a Cecil B. DeMille biblical epic. Everything lurches and clanks, a valve sputters somewhere, and even the summer sun feels like air-conditioning.
No. 3607 pushes onward, past the future site of Waubuno Park and along the back of the Ministry of Transport marine facility, which we now know as the Canadian Coast Guard base. The buoy tender St. Heliers is alongside, a smudge of coal smoke hovering over her funnel. Through another cutting we go and across the little trestle by the beach and below the hill where the venerable Belvidere Hotel stood until its demise by fire a few years previously.
Now we shove the coal cars into Beatty’s, just before the crossing of Bay Street, pull out of the spur, move forward again, and stop for the brakeman to walk forward to flag the road traffic on Bay Street. Once it stops, No. 3607 gives two long, one short, and another long steamy blasts on her whistle. Bell ringing, it trundles across Bay Street and leans into a sharp left turn towards the Seguin River. The whole entourage passes in back of Parry Sound Marine and follows a sharp curve to the right, into the Beaver Lumber yard. The two lead cars, the flats of lumber, are pushed into a spur, their brakes tied down, and our errand continues.
The now-diminished train carries on over a through-girder bridge over the Seguin River and cants into a sharp left-hand turn. We pause for another switch to be thrown and then reverse direction toward the harbour to complete our assignment. There is an atmosphere of urgency in the cab now. We are technically in Canadian National territory and in the whole complex of industrial trackage in Parry Sound, the C.P. and C.N.R. have a time-share agreement, in which the C.P. has operating rights between 6 a.m. and noon and the C.N. from noon until 6 p.m. Accordingly, No. 3607 has less than half-an-hour to complete her assignments and “get out of Dodge”. So, with much rasping of wheel flanges, our train sways and rocks over the somewhat wobbly track to the Imperial Oil facility, where the tanker Imperial Hamilton is discharging the last of a load of furnace oil. We park our six empties and No. 3607 hooks onto twelve full cars for the communities up the line as far as Sudbury.
Hoping to traverse the rest of the industrial trackage by locomotive, we take potluck, say good-bye and thank you to No. 3607’s crew, and hike up to the murky confines of the Kipling Hotel for lunch and to kill some time until the C.N. engine shows up. Murky the Kipling might be, but at least it’s not like a bake-oven.
After lunch at the Kipling, we are rewarded by the appearance of C.N.R.’s No. 2387, an engine somewhat similar to C.P.R.’s No. 3607. She too has come to park some empty tank cars and deliver two boxcar loads of beer to the nearby Brewers’ Retail warehouse. Can we come along for the ride? Sure, says the engineer, hop on up, just watch your knees on the top step.
We deliver the precious cargo, whose destination is just outside the current town limits, for Parry Sound is (officially) a dry community. Then we pick up eight tank cars of gasoline, destined for Sudbury and Capreol and intermediate points, and back our way towards town. But, instead of crossing the river, we carry on up towards Bowes Street, pausing to pick up an empty box car and a refrigerator car at International Grocers, which is built with a curved wall to accommodate a bend in the track. You can still see this building, adjacent to the present-day Indian Friendship Centre.
Glancing back to 2007 for a moment, we see evidences of the old trackage north of Bowes Street have pretty well vanished, but we’ll ignore that for a moment as we revert to 1953 and continue our fantasy-journey. A short distance up the line is Hawkins’ Feed Service, where No. 2387 had left a box-car of bagged animal feed just after noon. No. 2387, her spur-line chores almost complete, carries on past the storage yard of the McIsaac Bus Service, across Dufferin Street, past McKinnon Industries, and makes one final stop at a concrete block factory to take two empty covered cement hopper cars and three loaded flat cars in tow. The final phase of the operation is to take the tank, flat, box, and refrigerator cars to the yard at South Parry, some three miles to the south. There is a clear line and the engineer invites us to take the ride, but it’s a long walk back from South Parry, so we regretfully decline and, speckled with cinders and high on the aroma of coal smoke, we descend the cab ladder back into the present, our mission completed.
The rails gradually vanished over the years following our imaginary journey and the final coup-de-grace was the closure of the oil tank farm, whose footings can be seen to this day.
Nos. 3607 and 2387, of course, are now parked securely in the Celestial Roundhouse. And the freight trains, longer and faster than anyone imagined 54 years ago, thunder through Parry Sound without pause and without the “foreign” cars that gave us such wanderlust, cars from the Southern Pacific, the Louisville and Nashville, the Milwaukee Road, and the Nickel Plate. Now we have double-stacked containers with the markings of Hyundai, Yang Ming Lines, China Shipping, and Hapag, all symptomatic of globalization.
But as we tread the fitness trail, we are following in the footsteps of the humble but vital little trains that helped keep Parry Sound on the map as an important transportation centre. So, happy walking…and happy recollections!
The Fitness Trail: History On Our Doorstep
Without realizing it, many of us walk the fitness trail in innocent oblivion of what it used to be in the chapters of Parry Sound’s railway history.
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