Polar Bear Express is still going strong
Fly to Timmins, then board passenger train that travels all the way to Moosonee
MOOSE FACTORY, ONT.— My Canada includes black flies. A pair of camping trips north from Toronto in the 1970s, were my first experiences in northern Ontario, driving past Sudbury in an Audi Fox with my sister and her husband, passing through Kirkland Lake and Hearst before the bugs made us turn back at Nagagamisis Provincial Park. It was where I first heard about the Polar Bear Express, a tourist train that went from Cochrane to the tip of James Bay.
Once you could buy a ticket in Toronto’s Union Station and hop on the next train north. It was the best way to get on the Polar Bear Express, but the Northlander from Toronto to Cochrane stopped running in 2012, so a Porter flight to Timmins is now the quickest way there.
There’s no guarantee of seeing wildlife from a train or a car, but at Cedar Meadows Resort just outside Timmins, owner Richard Lafleur runs a private wildlife park in addition to the hotel’s spa, dining room and cabins. I meet Richard before the daily 3 p.m. tour, so he takes me out in his truck to meet his moose.
We drive back and forth along the trail through the park, visiting his bison and deer and two pairs of typically belligerent swans before Richard cuts the engine and heads off into the brush. After a few minutes, a big elk appears. Then Richard calls out to me, “He’s on his way!” Seconds later, a young moose lopes out from the trees, following a little deer.
The trio are friends, Richard tells me, and if he can find one, he can usually find all three. He takes a poplar branch out of the truck bed and the deer and the moose happily follow him, snacking while he brushes big deer flies away from their faces.
You’ll have another chance to get up close with the wildlife at the Cochrane Polar Bear Habitat, just a short walk from the train station. Staff oversee a trio of male bears who have the run of seven hectares of enclosures that include a private lake, which means that they don’t perform, and your encounters with them are strictly by chance.
On the morning I’m there, however, Inukshuk, the huge, dominant bear, brings his breakfast of beaver carcass up to the glass and sniffs around while he eats. He’s probably smelling me, and I remember what I was told before heading north: “If you’re over a kilometre away from the bear, you’re tracking it. If you’re less than a kilometre away, it’s tracking you.” It makes me grateful for the big plate glass window between us.
The Polar Bear Express leaves Cochrane at 9 a.m. sharp, after the crew has spent the previous night loading up the baggage car and the flatcars with goods and vehicles — the train is the only way to get your truck up to Moosonee and beyond. Ontario Northland has begun refurbishing the rolling stock, and I get on the car with its new blue and yellow paint job and refreshed interior; there’s a dome car waiting to be put back into service, but it’s still in the yard.
The train heads north along the tracks originally laid by the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway parallel to the Moose River, through 300 kilometres of taiga or muskeg stretching out endlessly on either side. Most of the passengers are locals who board with pillows for a nap, or spend the trip socializing in the dining car, but I spend the fiveand-a-half hours staring out the windows at the raw wilderness of marsh, tamarack and black spruce.
The train pulls into Moosonee in the mid-afternoon. There were three hotels by the river on the far side of town, but they’ve all closed, so I take a water taxi across the Moose through the islands of Tidewater Provincial Park to the Cree Village Ecolodge in Moose Factory. Opened in 2000 by the Cree community, it has a lovely vaulted dining room, books everywhere and rustic rooms, the best of which face the Moose and the long, summer sunset. The old Hudson’s Bay Company staff house on the far side of the island is the beginning of English Ontario, the site of one of the company’s first trading posts in the 17th century. The staff house is now a museum, while Centennial Park outside contains a half dozen original HBC buildings and a cemetery for company officials and their families, picturesque and overgrown.
After a tasty meal of salmon and baked potato at the Ecolodge, I wait out the endless dusk with a book, but finally end up having what was probably the best night’s sleep I’ve had in a year, nothing but the sounds of the river outside my window. The next day, I arrange for a boat trip with George Small, who tells me how his father ran tours of the Moose and James Bay during the heyday of the Polar Bear Express in the 1960s and ’70s.
We watch a pair of moose play like colts in the shallows then head out past Ship Sands Island to the mouth of James Bay. George’s son Trevor cuts the motor and we drift on the dark water under a heavy sky. Riding back to Moosonee, he tells me that they haven’t seen as many beluga whales as they used to, but that business is still OK.
“Yesterday, I took a lady out who said I was on TripAdvisor!”
The Polar Bear Express is run a bit more informally than most trains, and on the way back to Cochrane, I’m invited to ride up front with the engineers until the first flag stop where the tracks cross the Moose. The ride is stiffer than back in the passenger cars, but the view is amazing down the long, straight track through the muskeg and into another long, northern Ontario summer evening. Rick McGinnis was hosted by Ontario Tourism, which didn’t review or approve this story.