National Transcontinental Railway - NTR Legacy

NTR Legacy

The significant cost overruns of the NTR/GTPR construction contributed to the downfall of Laurier's Liberals in 1911 and Robert Borden's Tories were forced to finish the project, including the disastrous spanning of the St. Lawrence River with the Quebec Bridge.

The NTR route across northern Quebec and Ontario, far from the major population centres, had been approved by Laurier's government largely due to the support of his Quebec caucus as the routing made Quebec City the preferred port for western grain shipments. The NTR in these provinces never lived up to its expectations for creating traffic, although it did aid the resource-rich mining communities of northern Ontario and northwestern Quebec for a time.

Under CNR (CN post-1960), the NTR route across northern Quebec and Ontario became a marginal secondary main line with little in the way of through freight or passenger traffic. At Nakina, the CNR had constructed the Longlac-Nakina Cut-Off, a 29.4-mile (47.3 km) section of track linking the NTR with the Canadian Northern line at Longlac, completed in 1924. A 122-mile (196 km) section of the NTR mainline between Nakina and Calstock, Ontario was abandoned in 1986 and the Ontario Northland Railway purchased the section of NTR mainline between Calstock and Cochrane, Ontario in 1993. The mainline was also abandoned by CN for 82 miles (132 km) east of Cochrane to La Sarre, Quebec in 1997.

West of Nakina, the combined NTR/GTPR line forms CN's transcontinental mainline through to Tête Jaune Cache, British Columbia, and sees very heavy traffic. From Tête Jaune Cache (Yellowhead Pass), the GTPR line to Prince Rupert is a secondary mainline as the CNoR line southwest from Tête Jaune Cache to Vancouver forms the CN mainline. In recent decades, congestion at many ports along the west coast of North America is making the GTPR's development of Prince Rupert an attractive alternative. Canadian National Railways (now a private corporation) recently completed port facilities at Prince Rupert capable of handling two million 20-foot equivalent units (TEU) per year, and is lengthening passing sidings on the line from Jasper to Prince Rupert. CNR now offers daily container train service between Prince Rupert, Chicago (Illinois) and Memphis (Tennessee).

East of La Sarre to Quebec City, the former NTR mainline supports a network of CN branchlines in northern Quebec, although the Quebec Bridge and related trackage in the Quebec City area is heavily used by freight and passenger traffic as part of the Quebec City–Windsor Corridor.

From Quebec City east to Pelletier, Quebec, the former NTR mainline was abandoned in the 1980s following the completion in 1976 of a 30-mile (48 km) "cutoff" from the latter station to CN's former Intercolonial Railway mainline in the St. Lawrence River valley west of Rivière-du-Loup. However, from Pelletier east to Moncton the NTR mainline across central New Brunswick, including the massive bridges in the Appalachian Mountains, is still heavily used and forms the core of CN's Montreal-Halifax mainline.