While there may be some temptation to celebrate the news that OmniTrax has reached an agreement in principle with Fairfax Financial Holdings and Missinippi Rail Partners to restore rail service to Churchill via the Hudson Bay Railway, this bit of a good news is only the first step in a long process to repair the Hudson Bay port town’s only land link to the rest of the province.
Before the really important stuff can even get started, the agreement has to progress from one in principle to one in details, which won’t necessarily be an easy process. Although OmniTrax bought the railway fro only about $10 million back in 1997 along with Port of Churchill, the company may wish to get more than that for selling it in order to recover some of the money it claims to have lost operating it over the past 20 years or simply because it senses that repairing the line is worth more to the would-be buyers than what they paid for it.
Once those details are ironed out, and ownership of the railway and port, along with the Churchill Marine Tank Farm, is transferred is when the really hard work of repairing the railway will begin.
No matter what you think about how OmniTrax has run the railway and the way it has, as a consequence, left residents of Churchill in the lurch, there is no doubt that the terrain the tracks travel across presents challenges to maintaining a usable railway, including permafrost, frost heaving, flooding and just plain distance from population centres. And while the players involved say their intention is to have the railway repaired as quickly as possible, where the money to pay for the repairs, estimated at $40 to $60 million by a consultant hired by OmniTrax, is coming from and when they will actually begin, is far from clear.
The real celebrations can be saved for the day when a train rolls into the station in Churchill once again.
