Published July 16, 2013.
The railway gave birth to the town of Lac-Mégantic. Now, it has brought death and destruction to the lakeside community founded in 1885, during Canada's great railway boom.
With 37 people confirmed dead as of Monday, the derailment in this town of 6,000 has brought home to Canadians the realization that the mode of transportation that inspired Confederation now poses very real safety risks.
"The railway has gone from being a 19th century darling of development to now something that has pretty serious liabilities for the way we live," said Duncan McDowall, an adjunct professor of history at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont.
The tragedy has people across Canada casting a worried eye at railway tracks that sit cheek by jowl with homes, businesses and playgrounds from St. John's to Victoria.
"They run through the hearts of communities right across the country. Rail goes through the middle of towns everywhere," said Keith Stewart, climate and energy campaign co-ordinator for Greenpeace Canada.
The disaster is a poignant illustration of how vulnerable Canadian towns are to a rail catastrophe, said Stewart, who argues federal regulations covering railway tanker cars are not stringent enough.
"By using these older unsafe cars, we're loading the dice in favour of disaster," he warned.
The tragedy has shattered Canadians' romantic image of rail as the iconic industry that prompted Canada's emergence as an independent country in 1867.
"Without railways, there would be and could be no Canada," George Stanley, the historian who designed the Maple Leaf flag, once declared.
In the 19th century, towns bent over backward to attract railroads, seen as a surefire guarantee of prosperity, Mc-Dowall said.
"It was the ambition of every city and small town in Eastern Canada to have the railway run right through its centre. You only had to look at the kind of pictorial illustrations of the time that feature the billowing smoke of the steam engine coming right downtown," he said.
"Municipal politicians would go out of their way to get the railway to come downtown: no civic taxes, cash up front, any amount of political chicanery that politicians were capable of in the 19th century to get that railway to come to town," McDowall said.
"Now, we're seeing the flip side of that. Railways are rooted to these routes and are now moving cargoes that are more dangerous," he said.
Today, municipalities draw few benefits from railways and lack powers to restrict the transportation of dangerous products over their territory, Stewart said.
"They have no say. Railroads are special in Canada. Right from the founding; they're a
force unto themselves and only the federal government can touch them," he said.
The reason railways now pose a higher safety risk is a sharp rise in oil shipments in the wake of ramped-up production of shale oil from the Bakken formation in Montana, North Dakota and
Saskatchewan and bitumen from Alberta's oilsands, Stewart said.
The Canadian Railway Association estimates oil shipments by rail have increased by a staggering 28,000 per cent since 2009.
From just 500 carloads in 2009, shipments of crude have risen to an estimated 130,000 to 140,000 this year - amounting to 230,000 barrels per day.
The train that derailed in Lac-Mégantic was hauling about 50,000 barrels of crude from North Dakota to the Irving Oil refinery in Saint John, N.B. Railways offer greater availability and flexibility than pipelines, Stewart said. He said that since shale-oil fields have a shorter lifespan than traditional oil wells, it is not feasible in many cases to build pipelines to serve them.
The derailment and explosion involved DOT-111 type tanker cars, which have been criticized by transportation safety experts for their tendency to rupture during derailments.
"In both the U.S. and Canada, transportation safety boards said over and over again the type of rail cars used to transport the vast majority of hazardous products like oil are unsafe," Stewart said.
"You can no longer build the 111 cars, but they still make up 70 per cent of the fleet," he added.
Stewart charged the government has ignored its own experts in allowing use of that type of tanker cars for transporting dangerous products. "We should be worried because we rely on the federal government to protect community safety. The government has chosen to keep costs low for the oil companies and rail companies over community safety," he said.
The railway that runs though Lac-Mégantic played a role in the saga of Canadian Pacific's transcontinental railroad, said Jack Little, a professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., and an expert on the Eastern Townships.
The line was the brainchild of Eastern Townships businessman and politician John Henry Pope (1819-1889), who served as minister of agriculture
and later minister of railways under prime minister John A. Macdonald. Pope's St. Francis and Mégantic International Railway was chartered in 1870 but the project of connecting Montreal with Saint John, N.B., foundered and almost ruined Pope financially.
The reason for building a railway to Saint John was to connect major cities like Montreal to a Canadian port on the Atlantic, Little explained. Before that, Central Canada's only connection to a winter port was via the Grand Trunk to Portland, Maine, he said.
Originally, Lac-Mégantic consisted of the twin towns of Mégantic and Agnes, named after the prime minister's wife, Baroness Macdonald, who rode a cowcatcher on the first train that rode into Lac-Mégantic, Little said.
The history of rail shows that it often took catastrophic accidents to push governments to introduce tougher regulations on railway safety, McDowall said.
"One of the first things was continuous brakes on trains," he said.
"I think we're about to see this in Canada now, that this will provoke a debate over whether the tank car should be double hulled," he said.
"In the 19th century, trains could do no wrong because they were seen as the engines of prosperity," he added.
"We see them in a more ambivalent light, especially when there is a cost to pay like this."