PGE\BC Rail centennial O
ne hundred years ago, an ambitious and impractical railway was born in British Columbia. It became known as the Pacific Great Eastern and it plotted a rugged route from North Van- couver inland through the Coast Ranges to the thinly populated interior of B.C. to connect with the under construction Grand Trunk Pacific at Fort George (later Prince George). It was a dream, like so many others doomed by World War I and with it the end, for at time at least, of im- migration and European investment. In 1918, the Province of British Columbia took over the bank- rupt railway, and for several decades the PGE, which was called the “Prince George Eventually” and other unflattering names, struggled to survive on very limited traffic. Building from North Vancouver along the seacoast to Squamish was too expensive, so until 1956 the southern end of the mainline was at Squamish, reached only by steamer and tugs and barges. The PGE developed a modest roster of 2-6-2’s, 2-8-0’s, and 2-8-2’s, as well as a gaggle of gas cars.
Passenger equipment was an assortment of rebuilt interurbans, standard coaches, troop sleepers and other odd-ball rolling stock. The shop crew at Squamish were adept at keeping things running and making-do in good Depression-era, cost-cutting style. By the early 1950’s things began to change. Under B.C. premier W.A.C. Bennett, the railway was seen as a development tool, and it was completed to Prince George and expanded far to the north into the Peace River district and beyond. Mines, sawmills and paper mills brought vastly increased traffic. With this prosperity, steam was retired by the mid-1950’s, replaced by GE 70-tonners, RS-3’s
and RS-10’s. RDC’s took over the passenger services in 1956. As traffic grew and more branch- lines were constructed the PGE bought more Montreal Locomotive Works locomotives, especially RS-18’s. Big power came in 1970 with the purchase of C-630M’s and then came the big safety cabs. Secondhand Alcos arrived in numbers: ex-Erie Lackawanna C425’s, ex-Lehigh & Hudson River C-420’s and others. Adding to the diversity were the smaller MLW M-420W’s and cabless M-420B’s for branchlines and mainline services. Remote control units helped the long trains. When there were no more MLW’s to be had, SD40-2’s arrived. In 1972 the PGE became the British Columbia Railway and later BC Rail.
In 1974 a steam program began featuring former CPR Royal Hudson 2860 with matching ex- CPR maroon coaches and a back up 2-8-0. The RDC passenger service was impressive. They ran daily to Lillooet through the mountains, and daily or three-times-a-week to and from Prince George over a distance of 466 miles. Often, four or more were on the trains. In many ways it was a backwoods, community service operation that dropped off mail and newspapers along the way and carried school kids home from Lillooet. In the early 1990’s, the big six-axle MLW’s were traded to GE for wide-bodied Dash-8’s, which became the standard mainline power for a decade before being augmented by Dash-9’s beginning in the mid-1990’s. Secondhand GE units came too: the Santa Fe B36-7 with Mojave and Arizona desert sand in their tanks, C36-8’s and B39-8E’s. The ever-imaginative railway rebuilt RS-18’s with 2,000 h.p. Caterpillar engines and RS-3’s were turned into slugs to work with them as yard engines. Then there was the Tumbler Ridge Subdivision with seven new General Motors’ GF6C electrics on a spectacular 50 kV overhead electrification system to haul coal from a new mining district opened in 1983. The unraveling of this diverse system to produce a much-simplified railway came in the early
2000’s. A downturn in the mines saw the end of the electrics in 2000, although a diesel-hauled op- eration remained. Steam service was cancelled at the end of the 2001 season, and all passenger services stopped on October 31, 2002, except for a school service along the rugged shore of Seton Lake, operated in cooperation with the Seton Lake Indian Band. Then in 2004, despite political promises not to sell the railway, it was leased long term to CNR,
which many said amounted to much the same thing. CN didn’t take long to retire the older or un- usual diesels and the rebuilt RS-18’s; many of the used GEs and the SD40-2’s soon were gone. A convention is scheduled by the PGE-BCR Modellers Group for July 13-15, 2012, at Squamish,
B.C. to celebrate BC Rail and the PGE’s centennial. It was an amazing railway that didn’t give up easily, and CN’s former BCR route is still one of the most spectacular, interesting and demanding on the continent. What a great subject for modeling.
ROBERT D. TURNER 40
photography/ROBERT TURNER unless noted JANUARY 2012
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