Rail disruption hurts Churchill’s ecotourism industry

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This article was published 25/07/2007 (6719 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Churchill’s only land connection to the rest of Manitoba was severed for more than a week after unsafe railway conditions north of Gillam and a train derailment in Saskatchewan conspired to disrupt traffic along the Hudson Bay Railway.

At the height of the summer beluga whale-watching season, Manitoba’s top ecotourism destination had to contend with tour cancellations, stranded passengers and even a brief food shortage, as Churchill groceries ran out of perishable goods late last week.

VIA Rail has been forced to fly at least 240 people in and out of the coastal town since July 17, when an annual maintenance check by Hudson Bay Railway workers discovered approximately 140 railway defects along the 1,300-kilometre line, said VIA Rail customer-experience director Michael Woelcke and Mike Ogborn, president of OmniTRAX Canada, which owns Hudson Bay Railway and the Port of Churchill.

VIA Rail passenger service was set to resume last weekend, but a CN derailment near Canora, Sask. on July 22 stranded trains destined for Churchill.

The first passenger train in eight days was slated to roll into Churchill on Wednesday night, but the threat of a strike at VIA Rail and thick smoke from northern Manitoba forest fires has only added to a tense situation along the railway.

“It’s a complicated set of circumstances at the moment,” said Ogborn in a telephone interview from Denver, OmniTRAX’s home base.

Both his railway and VIA are now struggling to get traffic back on schedule, as Hudson Bay workers try to fix railway defects that still force trains to slow down to 16 km/h — thus adding an additional nine hours to the usual 32-hour ride from Winnipeg to Churchill.

“As each day progresses, the ‘slow orders’ come off, and the speed of the trains will increase,” said Ogborn.

OmniTRAX and VIA hope to be back on schedule by next week. OmniTRAX has six people working full time to repair the track and will then study how to upgrade every section of the line, Ogborn said.

Improvements must be made in order for VIA Rail to continue to provide passenger service along the Hudson Bay Railway, said Woelcke, whose company spent more than $200,000 on flights for stranded passengers over the past week.

“We are not able to maintain the scheduled travel times with the current level of track maintenance, which makes it very difficult to serve our customers,” said Woelcke, noting simple maintenance up in the muskeg is not enough. “Our goal is to run trains on time.”

Regardless of who’s to blame, the eight-day rail disruption has left Churchill’s ecotourism industry seething, as hotels and tour operators count their losses from cancellations.

One hotel owner said VIA Rail did nothing to notify some of his clients were about the rail disruption.

“We have never had this situation handled in such a horrible manner,” he said.

Woelcke countered it was impossible to contact passengers who were already in transit to train terminals in Winnipeg and Thompson.

But Churchill’s largest beluga whale-watching operator was spared a big financial hit when a tour group based in Winnipeg rented a bus and drove to Hudson Bay, Sask. to catch an otherwise stranded train.

“We’re only out about $2,000,” said Doreen Macri, co-owner of Sea North Tours. “But we would have been out more like $10,000.”

Tourists come to Churchill in the summer primarily to see beluga whales, which congregate by the thousands in the Churchill River estuary. Economically, the summer whale-watching season is second in importance only to the October-November polar bear season, when hundreds of the large carnivores gather on the tundra east of the town to wait for Hudson Bay to freeze up.

Given the importance of ecotourism to Churchill, city officials are reluctant to talk about rail disruptions.

After years of complaints, Churchill’s council and Chamber of Commerce have formally asked OmniTRAX and VIA Rail to upgrade infrastructure and service along the Hudson Bay Railway, but have stopped short of outright blaming either company for disrupted service.

“As you can understand, it can have some pretty negative ramifications if it starts to look like we can’t handle the tourists,” said Rose Preteau, president of Churchill’s Chamber of Commerce.

“We don’t want tourists to go ‘this train system is not viable.’ We can’t afford to lose our tourism.”

Preteau said Ottawa must step in to properly fund and ensure the safety of Canada’s railways.

“The federal government must be lobbied to ensure the railway system that built this country is not allowed to deteriorate,” she said. “The most recent situation wasn’t even on our track — it was a CN track.”

Along with a train station, Churchill is served by an airport and ocean port. But no highway extends that far north.

Provincial Road 290 extends as far as Sundance, approximately 200 kilometres south of Churchill.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca