https://ottawasun.com/news/local-news/sad-sight-as-wakefield-steam-train-is-dismantled/wcm/3aa70ee2-da2b-4724-b25d-a42afc7ed195
SAD SIGHT: Wakefield steam train is dismantled
Gatineau PQ
May 1, 2019
There, eight train cars that for a quarter century or more carried tourists and railway enthusiasts up to Wakefield and back are being cut into pieces, final destination unknown.
Philip Jago is well aware of what’s going on in an industrial neighbourhood in Gatineau, near where St. Joseph Boulevard slips under the Highway 5 Autoroute, but he can’t bring himself to go look.
There, eight train cars that for a quarter century or more carried tourists and railway enthusiasts up to Wakefield and back are being cut into pieces, final destination unknown.
“I don’t want to see that,” Jago said. “I would rather remember the good times.”
A member of the Bytown Railway Society, and in particular its Dirty Hands Club of restorers, Jago served as a fireman on the steam train, making the round trip scores of times, including its very last journey, on June 18, 2011. Five days later, heavy rains damaged the tracks and operations were suspended. The estimated cost to repair the track was in the millions, and despite the efforts and hopes of many groups and people, the service was never restored. In 2011, the municipality of Chelsea took out about 20 kilometres of the track to convert the bed to a trail, thus ending any chance that rail service would return.
In its heyday, the Wakefield steam train carried thousands of passengers each year. The service, Jago said, began in the mid 1970s, when trains left from the Canada Science and Technology Museum on St. Laurent Boulevard and crossed the Prince of Wales Bridge into Quebec.
The most recent incarnation of the train — a Swedish-made locomotive and cars brought to the area after the previous 1201 locomotive was deemed no longer fit for service — ran from 1992 until 2011.
According to City of Gatineau spokesperson Yves Melanson, the steam locomotive that most recently plied the tracks to Wakefield has been sold to the Dalton Ecological Park in Gatineau, where it will be on display alongside a replica of the early-1900s Templeton train station later this year.
The cars, meanwhile, were sold to Alain Boucher, who said all but one were damaged beyond reasonable repair. The remaining one he intends to convert into an American-style diner, which he’ll move to Cantley, Que., where it will sit alongside the chip wagon he currently operates there.
And while Jago is saddened to see the remaining eight cars cut up for scrap, he recognizes their number was up. Apart from being dilapidated, he said the cars, because they were of Swedish origin that bore unique coupler systems, weren’t compatible with North American trains.
“But this is still a moment,” he said. “Words cannot describe it.
“I was there as a fireman from the fall of 2006 until the rain came. I was working part-time, fulfilling a childhood dream with the intent of making that a retirement career. I don’t know exactly how many trips I made on that train,” he added, “and once you get away from it, it’s never been enough, if you have any passion for steam.
“C’est triste.”
