The Ontario Southland Railway helped keep General Motors plants humming when a bridge clearance issue arose after a track project on Canadian National.
CN, which handles the majority of traffic in St. Thomas, Ontario, suffered a line outage on the Talbot Spur when a program to fix track in the St. Thomas yard resulted in clearance problems at the Barwick Street overpass. Flatcars loaded with automotive frames could no longer clear after the spur track was raised.
CN took the spur out of service for three days to make emergency repairs.
St. Thomas is home to the Formet Industries plant that produces frames for multiple GM facilities, including Flint, Mich., and Oshawa, Ont. The CN line outage would have caused shutdowns at several assembly plants.
The Ontario Southland, which links with CN at St. Thomas and Beachville, Ont., was able to forward the traffic for CN. CN delivered empties to Beachville, and OSR handled the cars from there to St. Thomas. CN then pulled the loads and handed them to OSR at St. Thomas for the trip back to the CN connection at Beachville.
CN and OSR cooperated to detour the traffic beginning April 7. The line is still closed.
Canadian Pacific had operated a dedicated frame service “sprint train” from 1998 to 2009 from St. Thomas to Oshawa, a route that used trackage that’s now the OSR. This is the first time the short line has handled frames for GM.
Does anyone have some spare change to donate to CN track engineers to buy a tape measure?
Sorry wrong article
How much did they raise the track? It looks like there is plenty of room for adjustment under that bridge.