Ontario Northland Railway HO Scale Models

The Ontario Northland Railway traces its origins to the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway, incorporated by an act of the Ontario legislature on March 17, 1902, as a provincially owned Crown corporation. Construction began in 1903 with the intention of opening up the resource-rich lands of northeastern Ontario to settlement and economic development. The railway proved consequential almost immediately: workers cutting timber for ties near the 103-mile marker discovered rich silver deposits that sparked the largest silver rush in Canadian history and gave rise to the town of Cobalt. By 1905 the line had reached New Liskeard in the Lake Timiskaming district, pushing on to Englehart in 1906 and Cochrane in 1909. The discovery of mineral wealth along the right-of-way fundamentally shaped the economy of Northern Ontario, with gold, silver, copper, and nickel deposits all identified during construction through the Canadian Shield. Extension of the railway northward to tidewater on James Bay proceeded in fits and starts. Construction toward the bay began in 1921 but was suspended by Conservative premier Howard Ferguson in 1923 on the grounds that the line would not be profitable. The terminus remained at Fraserdale for several years while the Abitibi Canyon Generating Station was under construction nearby. Work resumed between 1928 and 1930 at a slow pace before being accelerated as a depression-era employment measure. On July 15, 1932, the line reached Moosonee at the mouth of the Moose River, completing a north-south main line of roughly 700 kilometres that remains one of the few rail connections to subarctic Ontario. The railway was renamed the Ontario Northland Railway on April 5, 1946, partly to associate the line more broadly with the province and partly to eliminate persistent confusion with the Texas and New Orleans Railway, whose identical reporting initials had caused boxcars and invoices to be misdirected across North America. Through the postwar decades the ONR expanded its freight operations to serve the mining industry, constructing spurs to Sherman Mine near Temagami in 1968, Adams Mine near Kirkland Lake in 1963, and Kidd Creek Mine outside Timmins in 1967. In 1993 the railway acquired a segment of the former National Transcontinental Railway main line running west from Cochrane to Calstock after CN sought to abandon the underused corridor. The ONR also operated passenger service between Toronto and Cochrane under the Northlander name until that train was discontinued on September 28, 2012, following a provincial government announcement the previous March that it intended to wind down the Ontario Northland Transportation Commission. After significant opposition from northern communities and a review process completed in early 2014, the provincial government reversed course and confirmed that the railway would remain in public ownership. Today the Ontario Northland Railway continues to operate as a Class III carrier under the Ontario Northland Transportation Commission, a Crown agency of the Government of Ontario headquartered in North Bay. Its main line runs from North Bay northward through Cobalt, New Liskeard, Cochrane, and on to Moosonee, with a significant branch extending eastward from Swastika through Kirkland Lake and across the Quebec border to Rouyn-Noranda, that portion operated through a subsidiary called the Nipissing Central Railway. The railway remains a critical freight link for mining and forestry industries in a region where road infrastructure is sparse, and it retains the distinction of being one of the few common-carrier railways in Canada that reaches James Bay tidewater.