Sunday, August 31, 2014

When I was young, and the Dead Sea was still alive...


The first hydro-electric plant I operated after finishing my training as station operator, back in the 1950s. In those days, this plant had glass in all its windows, and I had all my hair and teeth. There was housing for the operators who manned it 24 hours a day, as well as a Chief Operator's home, and another for the resident Handyman and his wife, who did the cooking for us single types.
That railway line (upper right) is the main line of the CN Rail, running between
Toronto and Sudbury, and on across the country. One morning about five a.m.,
just nicely daylight on a summer's day, two freight trains collided on the embankment just off-camera to the lower right, and the coupling off one of the
engines landed in the river just outside that lower window, second from left.
The wreckage missed the cookery & handyman's house by maybe 25 feet.
I was supposed to start my annual vacation that morning, coming off a midnight shift, and I couldn't get my car out of there until they moved the train cars blocking our crossing, and they wouldn't move anything until they found one 
of the train crew who was still missing after I got off shift at 8:00 a.m. - so I
volunteered to help look for him, and I crawled under a tangle of boxcars on the embankment, and finally found his boots, nearly buried in the gravel. 

He was still in them, and I clawed the gravel away from him, and got him out of
there. I think every bone in his body must have been broken. A couple of hours
later, they did move the remains of the train off our crossing, and I could get my car out of there, but after that experience, it wasn't much of a vacation for me.



After I left Ontario Hydro, I worked for several years for a private power company called Great Lakes Power with headquarters in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and hydro plants on two rivers flowing into Lake Superior north of there, at the eastern end of that lake, as well as one really old-timer hydro plant on the St. Mary's River, right in Sault Ste. Marie. I worked mostly at the plant
in this picture, which was the control station for two and eventually three others
downstream on the Montreal River there. The trestle above our dam is the main line of the Algoma Central Railway, and at one time, and possibly still, this was or is the longest curved railway bridge in North America. It is still very much in use, and the railway runs special scenic tours in the autumn for those wishing to see the glorious fall colors along the line. There's a band of hardwood forest along this eastern end of Lake Superior, extending from the beaches back for several miles inland, and when those leaves turn various shades of red in the fall, people come from hundreds of miles around to see them. So the railway
runs special trains for tourists at those times. It's a sight worth seeing, for sure.

Along the far shore of our lake above the dam, just a short distance from that western end of it (left) there was and possibly still is a popular fishing and hunting camp, which in my time was operated by an American from Michigan, and any time we wanted to go fishing, he would let us use one of his steel-hulled 16-footers for free, as long as we bought his gas. It worked out very well.
After he closed it up for the winters and returned to the U.S., we kept an eye on it for him until he came back in the spring. Some of the biggest Northern Pike I've ever seen came out of that lake which ran for about 30 miles above our dam. 

At the upper end of it, where the river flowed in, there was a rapids with several steps in them, and the river water was a shade of light golden brown, so we called that "The Golden Stairs". Below it, there was always a large patch of thick
foam on the water for some distance out from the 'stairs', and some really large fish hung around under that foam to feed on whatever washed down from above. One day my buddy Eddie hooked into one there, and after some struggle managed to reel it up to boat. When he pulled its head up through the foam,
he took a look at it, uttered a couple of choice cuss words, grabbed his handy belt knife, and promptly cut the line. I asked, "What the hell did you do that for? It might have been a record!" Eddie replied, " That monster was at least five inches between the eyes! We're thirty miles from home, and I'm not sitting in the same boat with that for two hours, record or not!" If you pulled one of those into the boat and its tail slapped the underside of your seat, it was like being spanked with a paddle. I caught one there that was big enough its nose touched one end of my 21 cubic foot chest-style freezer while its tail touched the other end, and that's a large fish.

And that's how I spent some of my wild and crazy younger days back in the '60s, before I decided to have a look at the west coast. 


These are old pictures off the web, and I couldn't clean them up much, but it gives you an idea of what that trestle over the dam looks like with a train on it
in the fall. You really have to be there for the full effect.


6 comments:

  1. Great story Ray. You've obviously done and seen a lot in your lifetime.

    Doesn't sound like fun pulling that guy out from under that train though..:-(

    By the way, I was brought up in Sudbury. Of course, the one in the US of A though...

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  2. When that train wreck happened, I had heard one engine sounding its horn, and ran to the window just in time to watch the northbound steam engine hit the southbound diesel, and the boiler on the steam engine exploded in a huge cloud of steam, and that coupling came flying into the river just outside my control room window. And my window was maybe 200 yards from the point of impact. The young guy on the steamer who got killed just happened to jump out on the wrong side of it, and about 20 boxcars came piling up on top of him on the side of a high gravel bank, so he didn't stand a chance. At the time, I was in my mid-twenties, and he looked to be about my same age.
    That really shook me up, because it was maybe the first time in my life when I was confronted with the unexpected brevity of our existence. He was a Catholic, and had just been to Confession I was told, just before that trip, and I was a newly-minted Catholic myself back then. While I was pulling him out of that gravel, I was quietly saying a prayer for both of us. If those wrecked cars had shifted, I might easily have joined him, but we got out alright.

    And on a lighter note, your Sudbury probably smelled better than mine. Mine was heavily polluted with sulphur dioxide fumes in those days from the smelter operation on the edge of it. That stuff pitted the chrome on new cars within three years. So it couldn't have been very healthy to breathe!

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  3. You mentioned Soo Ste. Marie...My mom and dad were born there (USA)..and grew up there...and my Uncle Joe was lock master of the Poe Lock back in the fortys...We (my dad and my bother Rog) saw a man catch a 5 lb. speckled trout out of the mill race of the power company...he was a beauty...My Uncle Joe use to catch Lake Superior white fish in the locks with a bamboo pole baited with May flies...They're wonderful eating fish...YUMMY!!!!

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  4. Wow! It really is a 'small world' after all, isn't it?

    Back in those days, before the International Bridge was built, the old car ferries hauled us back and forth, and those quit running for the day every evening about half past midnight. That last ferry from the U.S. back to Canada in the evenings was usually loaded with us partiers, and that reminds me....
    but more about that another time!
    Suffice it to say that was back during the height of the Cold War, and Kincheloe AFB with its Bomb Wing of B52-Hs was just a few miles outside town, and many
    of us 'foreigners' partied with members of the USAF in various establishments around the American Sault. Having been briefly in and out of the RCAF, I felt it my patriotic duty to help maintain good diplomatic relations with our neighboring Air Force, and sometimes maintaining those diplomatic relations took until 9:00 a.m. the next morning! But we won the Cold War, and that's what counts.

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  5. Sure sounds like I'm glad I grew up in my Sudbury and not yours...
    :-)

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  6. Yes, Tom, I think you made the right choice :>)

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