Exporail exhibit demonstrates early winter train travel
St-Constant’s Exporail museum shows the trials and treasures once involved in navigating Quebec’s harsh weather by train, as explained by Sarah Deshaies.
Snow is both a pleasure and a chore, and two trains can attest to winter’s eternal contradiction.
Visitors to Exporail in St-Constant on Montreal’s South Shore can now hop aboard a rotary snowplow and a commuter car that once ferried skiers to the Laurentians. Both are part of the museum’s exhibit Iron and Ice: Snow Trains.
Looming large, the 15-foot-high (4.6-metre) rotary snowplow is black like the coal that once fuelled it, but its windows, doors and blades are a gleaming firetruck red.
At the front is CN 55369’s raison d’être: nine chunky blades fanning out in a circle in the middle of a huge square frame. Designed to wade through heavy snowdrifts, the rotary snowplow’s steam engine would spin the blades, displacing reams of snow of any quality and quantity.
Last Saturday afternoon, my guide, McGill history student Matthew Gauthier, showed me a video of rotary snowplows spitting up a spout of white stuff in a chute downhill from the train. Without a plow of any kind, it was near impossible for trains to advance in heavy snow.
Clocking in at 224,000 pounds (110 tons), the rotary snowplow could not propel itself forward; one or two steam-powered locomotives would be lined up behind it to push it methodically down the track.
Gauthier brought me inside the rotary’s dark cabin. The fireman would keep the engine humming in the back, while a team of three to five workers operated a myriad of levers and machinery at the front.
Working conditions on trains in the winter were harsh. The cabin’s windows and vents would be kept open to temper the warmth inside, and snow and rain could freeze seats and machinery and leave workers drenched. Visibility outside was reduced. While companies would lament the costly but necessary work of clearing the tracks, rail workers would relish the pay and longer hours tied to a snowy day’s work.
The rotary snowplow was developed by American brothers, but was invented by Toronto dentist J.W. Elliott in 1869. It was considered a more powerful solution than the gaping wedge plows, which just pushed snow to the side of the track.
So the rotary went to use in especially snowy regions, like the Gaspé and the Rockies.
Rotary plows were expensive to operate, however, and most models now make their home in rail museums rather than on actual tracks. But Elliott’s technology would not be forgotten. Fifty-six years later, St-Léonard farmer Arthur Sicard modified the rotary snowplow’s turbine, turning it into the form of an endless screw: the world’s first snowblower.
CN 55369 is one of just two plows of this kind found in Canada. Built in 1928, it served in Lac-St-Jean and Abitibi for just over three decades before retirement. It arrived at Exporail in 1966 and was refurbished a few years ago, thanks to volunteers who reproduced some of its antiquated machinery.
While on display throughout the year, the rotary snowplow and the passenger train a few rows over are open for on-board visitors only in the winter months. The latter is the elegant CPR 1554, which debuted 110 years ago as a first-class car. Eventually, it would ferry eager skiers from Montreal to MontLaurier for runs in the crisp winter air.
The airy car features a green and ivory carpet, mahogany panelling, and minimal rails for overhead storage of ski gear. This model was also likely one of the first to use electricity to light the cabin, a safe and modern choice.
The rows of green velvet seats, still comfortable today, are the main draw. They provided a small luxury: the back support could move from one end of a seat to the other, allowing riders to make their own seating configurations.
The passenger car also allowed for a casual segregation of the genders. At one end, women and children had a tiny washroom tucked away next to a water fountain. Meanwhile, men who craved a cigarette before their destination could plop themselves on dark leather seats in a cosy smoking cabin, located at the opposite end. Cigarettes in hand, they would reach over to two tiny metal lighters, embedded in both sides of the door frame. In need of a shave as well? A wash basin was provided, down the hall from the men’s toilet.
The train transported 40,000 passengers in 1935 alone. According to Exporail’s Maurice Binette, the train helped fuel the development of the Laurentians as a tourist destination. The idea of ferrying skiers in search of fresh snow would catch on, chugging across the border to ski destination Stowe, Vt., and later to winter destinations in Europe as well.
The tour of each train takes 10 to 15 minutes. On your visit to Exporail, you can avail yourself of other attractions, like Of Steel and Paper: Tales From the CP Archives, which documents the early days of Canadian Pacific. It continues through May 27. And the Imax film Rocky Mountain Express screens daily in English at 1:30 p.m.