Nostalgia & History > Last train from Penticton, 25 years ago.

A friend noted that this weekend marks the 25th anniversary of the last revenue train out of Okanagan Falls and Penticton BC on CP's fabled Kettle Valley Division. By 1989, freight train operation involved two connecting trains operating twice a week.
One train operated from Penticton to Merritt BC, and another ran from Merritt to the CP main line at Spences Bridge. By that date, the traffic on the line was lumber from Okanagan Falls south of Penticton on the Osooyoos Sub., and lumber from Princeton BC. The Merritt switcher handled lumber from the four sawmills at Merritt, plus whatever traffic the Penticton train delivered to Merritt.

A CP corporate general manager had set his heart on abandoning the remaining 180 miles of the Kettle Valley before he retired, and so the several shippers on line were forced to find alternate transport. CP and Arrow Transport offered truck haulage for less than the cost of rail. I'm assuming CP paid Arrow to haul the lumber for cheap. Following the abandonment, several of the mills en route have closed following the housing downturn.

My images show the Merritt-Spences Bridge freight arriving at Spences Bridge. Beside the locomotive is the recently closed crew rest house.

The second image shows the same train returning to Merritt along the Nicola River canyon.

Finally, the same train is shown passing the Merritt station. Virtually all trace of the CP line in Merritt has vanished. The station was sold and moved off site, and the right of way has been converted to a road.

I was on a long layover as second engineer on the Via "Canadian" when the final clean up train operated on the Kettle Valley in 1989, and without my camera. The first engineer heard of the final train and borrowed a pickup truck to go and watch the train. He had never worked the "Kettle" but knew many of the crew members. I often wondered if anyone took a picture of the little gathering of railroaders saying goodbye at Merritt station. Within a year, the CP route "Canadian" was gone too.

A sad sidelight of the end of this route is that 25 years later, only 16 of the 160 "Kettle Valley Veterans", those who worked and maintained the line are still alive. At the time of closure, it was an old man's railroad.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/07/22 19:49 by eminence_grise.

Thanks for sharing

I have never seen any photos of trains on the Osoyoos Sub. Can you provide any reference?

Rick

Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

When you consider all the Provincial money that was poured into the PGE / BCOL, you would have thought the Kettle Valley Line might have had the same degree (or perhaps more) of strategic importance to the Province of British Columbia. I wonder if the Province considered taking it over from CPR just to keep rail service preserved in the region?

Doesn't a railroad, either privately or publicly owned, enter in the equation of a region's long-term transportation requirements anymore? Apparently not. It's highways, highways and more highways.

I frequently watch that cable TV show "Highway Through Hell" about a team of wreckers that clean up frequent highway wrecks in Coquihalla Canyon and realize the misguided policies that saw the railroad abandoned through there. The CPR offered safe and reliable transportation to the region. "Progress" is a bunch of eighteen wheelers constantly involved in wrecks and innocent motorists involved in the carnage along with them.

I wonder what the chair like structure on the roof of the station is for?

rschonfelder Wrote:
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> I have never seen any photos of trains on the
> Osoyoos Sub. Can you provide any reference?
>
> Rick

The Osooyoos Sub. ran south from Penticton along the west shore of Skaha Lake and the south to Osooyoos, just north of the US Border.

It came within three miles of connecting up with the Great Northern at Oroville WA. In fact, it was planned as "The Penticton Railway", a GN subsidiary. However, the GN had a change of heart after JJ Hill passed on, and the east-west line (VV&E) running along the border was proving trafficless. CP picked up the surveyed route from the GN, however they never completed the line along Skaha Lake until 1943.

The south Okanagan is very arid, and was one of the very few areas where peaches, cherries and citrus fruits grow. Until the mid 1960's, the line was busy with fruit traffic. This lent itself to trucking and by the mid seventies, the line was abandoned south of Okanagan Falls, at the south end of Skaha Lake. A large sawmill there kept the portion along Skaha Lake to Penticton active until the whole Kettle Valley route was abandoned in 1989.

Pictures of this scenic line are somewhat rare as it ran as required.

RNP47 Wrote:
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> I wonder what the chair like structure on the roof
> of the station is for?

The lights on the train order signal were originally kerosene, which required lighting every evening and refilling with fuel.

Most such signals were attached to a pulley system that would allow the telegraph operator to lower them to the ground. For some reason,Merritt station had a platform for the operator to stand while he lit and refueled the lamps.

By the 1930's, most train order signals had been electrified

CA_Sou_MA_Agent Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
>
> When you consider all the Provincial money that
> was poured into the PGE / BCOL, you would have
> thought the Kettle Valley Line might have had the
> same degree (or perhaps more) of strategic
> importance to the Province of British Columbia. I
> wonder if the Province considered taking it over
> from CPR just to keep rail service preserved in
> the region?
>
> Doesn't a railroad, either privately or publicly
> owned, enter in the equation of a region's
> long-term transportation requirements anymore?
> Apparently not. It's highways, highways and more
> highways.
>
> I frequently watch that cable TV show "Highway
> Through Hell" about a team of wreckers that clean
> up frequent highway wrecks in Coquihalla Canyon
> and realize the misguided policies that saw the
> railroad abandoned through there. The CPR offered
> safe and reliable transportation to the region.
> "Progress" is a bunch of eighteen wheelers
> constantly involved in wrecks and innocent
> motorists involved in the carnage along with them.


The life and times of the Kettle Valley route were very different from that of PGE/BCOL.

The reason for the existence of the KV was to carry minerals, mostly copper from the mines, concentrators, and smelters in southern BC to tidewater at Vancouver.

Most of the KV was within a few miles of the US Border, and it had to compete head to head with the Great Northern for the traffic.

At the turn of the 20th century, there were two parallel rail networks along the International Boundary. Often, it was the GN that arrived first.

The decline of the two lines started as the "easy pickings" of copper deposits ran out about 1915. Also,Augustus Heinz, a mining magnate from Butte MT and later Couer D'Alene WA., purchased many of the copper workings and centered the smelting business at Trail BC, served by the CPR. Later, CP purchased CM&S (Cominco) from Mr.Heinz as mining revenues continued to decline.

The old rivals, JJ Hill of the GN and Van Horne of the CP passed on around this time, and Louis Hill declared the rivalry was over.The GN came out ahead financially due to the big revenues during the copper rush, but he then started to downgrade portions of the GN in BC that no longer produced revenue.

Three significant events in the 1950's and 60's bought about the final decline of the Kettle Valley route. In 1955, the BC Government completed Highway 3 from Princeton to Hope where it connected to the Trans Canada. Overnight, the passenger train revenue vanished on the CP Kettle Valley route. Quickly, daylight RDC runs replaced full service passenger trains but the RDC's only lasted for five years or so.

The Coquihalla Pass was an operating headache for the KVR, due to constant rock slides and avalanches. Some were so large, they would take months to repair. There was an alternate route between Merritt and Spences Bridge, longer but away from the weather.
During the winter of 1962, a huge rock slide near the summit of Coquihalla Pass closed the line for six weeks. No sooner was it repaired than it came down again. NR.Crump, then President of the CPR ordered service over the Coquihalla suspended indefinitely and it never re-opened. Rails were lifted in 1964.

During the mid-sixties, CP secured a huge contract to haul coal from the Crowsnest Pass to export at Roberts Bank near Vancouver.
CP made the decision to rebuild a connecting line north from Fort Steele BC to Golden on the main line rather than to upgrade the southern route. In 1973, another portion of the Kettle Valley route between Midway and Penticton was closed as there was very little traffic on line.

The reason for the abandonment of the Kettle Valley route was too little revenue and too much track.