Northern Alberta Railway HO Scale Models

Northern Alberta Railways, operating under the reporting mark NAR, was a jointly owned Canadian railway that served the remote agricultural and resource regions of northern Alberta and northeastern British Columbia for more than half a century. Its origins lay in the early twentieth century efforts to connect the fertile Peace River country and the Athabasca waterways district to the broader Canadian rail network. Several predecessor lines were chartered and built during the 1910s and 1920s, most notably the Edmonton, Dunvegan and British Columbia Railway, the Alberta and Great Waterways Railway, the Central Canada Railway, and the Pembina Valley Railway. These lines were largely the work of contractor J.D. McArthur, though financial difficulties following the First World War forced the provincial government of Alberta to step in, eventually purchasing or leasing the various railways and operating them directly. By 1928, the province had consolidated these properties under a single collective name, and in March 1929 a federal charter formalized Northern Alberta Railways as a distinct corporate entity. The railway was then sold in equal shares to Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Railway, making it one of the relatively rare instances in North American railroad history of a jointly owned operating subsidiary maintained by two otherwise fiercely competing transcontinental carriers. At the time of its formation NAR was considered the third-largest railway in Canada by route mileage, running northwest from Edmonton toward Dawson Creek, British Columbia, and northeast toward the community of Waterways on the Athabasca River, with branches reaching Peace River, Fairview, Hines Creek, Grande Prairie, and Hythe. Despite its considerable reach, the railway struggled financially through the Great Depression and did not post its first profit until 1937. The Second World War transformed NAR's fortunes dramatically. When the United States entered the war following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Alaska Highway construction project was launched as a continental defense measure, and Dawson Creek served as mile zero of that highway. NAR was the sole railway serving the community, and the sudden surge in military traffic, combined with Royal Canadian Air Force training installations established throughout the region under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, pushed traffic to levels the system had never previously experienced. In 1964, the federally built Great Slave Lake Railway branched north from the NAR junction at Grimshaw to reach Hay River in the Northwest Territories, extending the utility of the NAR corridor as a gateway to the Mackenzie River basin. Throughout the postwar decades, NAR adapted to changing traffic patterns and motive power requirements. Dieselization was completed by October 1960, with the roster centered on Electro-Motive Division GP9 units and General Motors Diesel GMD1 locomotives. A final roster addition came in December 1975 with four SD38-2 units, reportedly the only examples of that model built in Canada. Traffic growth tied to Alberta's expanding oil and gas sector, and particularly to the development of the Athabasca oil sands around Fort McMurray during the 1970s, added considerable freight volume to the system's northeastern corridor. Passenger service, which had persisted in various forms including a brief and unsuccessful experiment with Budd Rail Diesel Cars beginning in 1966, was curtailed progressively, with service to Dawson Creek ending on June 1, 1974. The arrival of the Pacific Great Eastern Railway at Dawson Creek in 1958 had already redirected considerable traffic onto British Columbia provincial lines, diminishing the strategic importance of NAR's northwestern extremity. On January 1, 1981, Canadian National Railway purchased Canadian Pacific's equal share in the joint operation and absorbed Northern Alberta Railways entirely into the CN system, bringing the independent existence of the NAR to a close after roughly fifty-two years. The former NAR lines continued to operate under CN management, carrying the freight traffic of northern Alberta but no longer bearing the identity of the regional railway that had opened much of that country to agricultural settlement and industrial development. The NAR stands as a notable fallen flag in Canadian railroad history, remembered as an unusual cooperative venture between rival national carriers and as the primary rail lifeline for a vast and sparsely populated region whose economic development it both enabled and reflected.