Daily Archives: April 14, 2014

Searchmont Station Sold to Preservation Group

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More news today out of Algoma country.

A group calling itself the Searchmont Station Preservation & Historical Society has announced this afternoon that they’ve reached an agreement with CN to purchase the former ACR station at Searchmont. Their hope is to rebuilt and restore the structure, although one of CN’s conditions is apparently that the structure be moved away from the tracks, so it won’t be in its original context, but the plan is to keep it the town of Searchmont.

Here’s a link to some additional information on the group’s blog on their website:

http://www.searchmontstation.com/1/post/2014/04/april-14-2014.html

Searchmont station was built in 1902, and is one of the oldest surviving structures on the ACR line. Originally, it was a much larger structure than today, with a larger express/freight section on the north side, and a smoking room in a round extension on the south end. Eventually both of the extensions were removed (the smoking room was damaged by fire early in the station’s history) and certainly by the 1940s the station looked much as it does today.

Here’s how Searchmont station looked in the summer of 2013, although heavy snow this winter has since brought down the overhanging roof over the platform:

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The station closed around 1994, and has been abandoned and neglected for 20 years. At some point, about 5-6 years ago, the interior was heavily vandalized and with several broken windows the interior has been largely exposed to the elements for the last decade, so the structure is in rather rough shape, so it will be quite a project to restore. Apparently the preservation society also hopes to rebuilt the original extensions, so this will be quite the renovation project.

ACR Passenger Service Operating Subsidy Extended to March 2015

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At a press conference in Sault Ste. Marie this morning, the federal Minister of Transport Lisa Raitt announced a one-year extension of the operating subsidy to CN for the Algoma Central regular passenger service, to the end of March 2015.

While there’s no guarantee that service will be extended beyond that, this at least provides local municipalities, tourism groups, camp operators and other interested parties time to investigate and evaluate options for this service, instead of receiving the sudden news that service will simply end within a few months, as happened when the (original) news of the cancellation at the end of March 2014 broke in early January (later extended to end of April 2014).

This is a promising step, but expect that the federal government will still want to try to offload this subsidy at the end of the extension period, so we’ll probably still see a lot of lobbying from local groups over the next year trying to save this train. So far the local political pressure seems to have been successful in procuring the extension, so we’ll continue to follow this with interest.