 | |
 Bay of Quinte Railway Engine #5 and its crew, about to leave Napanee for Deseronto,c. 1900–1903. | |
| Overview | |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Deseronto, Ontario |
| Reporting mark | BQ[1] |
| Dates of operation | 1897 (1897)–1910 (1910) |
| Predecessor | Napanee, Tamworth and Quebec Railway (1879) Bay of Quinte Railway and Navigation Company (1881) |
| Successor | Canadian Northern Railway (nowCanadian National Railway) |
| Technical | |
| Track gauge | 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm)standard gauge |
TheBay of Quinte Railway (reporting markBQ) was ashort-line railway in easternOntario, Canada. It was formed as theNapanee, Tamworth and Quebec Railway (NT&QR), chartered in 1878 byEdward Rathbun andAlexander Campbell, with plans to run fromNapanee through Renfrew County and on to theOttawa Valley. Lacking funding from the governments, development never began.
Rathburn took over the charter in 1881. He started construction with the shorterBay of Quinte Railway and Navigation Company (BQR&NC) that ran from his factories inDeseronto to theGrand Trunk Railway mainline at Napanee.[2][3] Construction on the NT&QR out of Napanee through Yarkers to Tamworth started the same year, but was abandoned by the contractor and Rathbun had to pay the workers out of pocket.
The line finally opened to Tamworth in 1884. In 1889 it was extended westward toTweed while a branch eastward from Yarker to Harrowsmith connected to theKingston and Pembroke Railway with running rights toKingston. In 1890 the line was renamed theKingston, Napanee & Western Railway, and the next year it was leased to the BQR&NC. The eastern branch was extended from Harrowsmith toSydenham in 1893. In 1897, the two sections were legally merged into the newly formed Bay of Quinte Railway. In 1903 the final expansion was made northwestward from Tweed to connect to theCentral Ontario Railway at Bannockburn, with a total of 134 kilometres (83 mi).
The line was purchased by theCanadian Northern Railway (CNoR) in 1910, using its line from Napanee through Sydenham as the basis of a major expansion toSmiths Falls and ontoOttawa. CNoR's bankruptcy in 1918, followed by the Grand Trunk in 1923 led to the formation of theCanadian National Railways (CNR). Parts of the network were closed starting in 1935, and the last BQR fragment, fromNapanee's historic 1856 Grand Trunk station to aGoodyear tire factory, was disconnected from the CN mainline at Napanee station in 2010.[4]
In 1848, an American partnership purchased land near Culbertson's Wharf, building asawmill to process logs from four million acres of timberland in theTrent River,Moira River,Salmon River andNapanee River watersheds. In 1855, Hugo Burghardt Rathbun moved to the area to take over the running of the business under the Rathbun Company name. The growing village was incorporated in 1871 as Mill Point and was renamedDeseronto in 1881.
Hugo's son, Edward Wilkes Rathbun expanded the company's enterprises, opening a cedar mill, a flour mill and a sash, door and blind factory; he operatedtugboats and lake freighters to carry cargo toOswego, New York. He later added four passenger ships and, by the 1880s, held a stake in three railways: the Bay of Quinte Railway, the Napanee and Tamworth Railway andGananoque'sThousand Islands Railway. He operated a 250-acre farm to provide horses for the logging operations and railway car shops to build rolling stock, along with general stores, a newspaper and various manufacturing works.[5]
At its 1895 peak, Deseronto's population reached 3338 people and Edward Wilkes Rathbun was a millionaire; an 1896 fire on the timber docks did a quarter-million dollars on damage, and the gradual depletion of natural resources (timber and minerals) on which the Rathbun business relied brought the company's activities to a halt by 1916. The Bay of Quinte railway, originally constructed to bring Rathbun's timber to market, was sold toCanadian Northern Railway in 1910 for inclusion in its Ottawa-Toronto mainline. CNoR reached the Pacific coast by 1915, but by 1918, it was bankrupt.Canadian National took over the CNoR network in 1923, embargoing the former BQR mainline in 1979 and removing the tracks in 1986.
The BQR was constructed in multiple segments:
CNoR incorporated the BQR line into its own mainline to Smiths Falls; CN abandoned the Tweed to Bannockburn line in 1935 and Tweed to Yarker in 1941, leaving just the Smiths Falls mainline. That line wasembargoed in 1979, abandoned in 1984 and removed in 1986. The 104 kilometres (65 mi) right of way from Smiths Falls to Strathcona, nearNapanee, is now theCataraqui Trail, a multi-use recreational trail operated by the Cataraqui Region Conservation Authority.[7]
The Bay of Quinte Navigation and Railway Company also owned the Rathbun dock inGananoque, Ontario; it entered a contract in which that town raised $10,000 in debentures in return for ashort line to be constructed from GTR'sGananoque railway station to the downtown waterfront. ThisThousand Islands Railway is now defunct, but one locomotive has been preserved at the former station beside Gananoque's town hall.[8]
An 1892McCord Museum archival photo depicts a head-on collision between two Bay of Quinte Railway engines.
On October 2, 1912, a BQR train derailed on a curve on the K&P line five miles north of Kingston, sending the second car from the engine and four freight cars, the mail car and a passenger car down a 12–15 foot embankment, killing two passengers. The engine reached Kingston unharmed.[9]
The BQR is a ghost rail line and very little remains to mark its role as a connecting link in CNoR's ultimately failed ambition to build a third viable national rail network. On most of the former Smiths Falls - Deseronto CNoR line, the tracks were removed in the 1980s.[10][11] CNoR's Smiths Falls station became theRailway Museum of Eastern Ontario; a few BQR stations in small villages were converted to private residences.[2]
