The Rice Lake Sunken Railway

The Railway that was doomed to fail

By Steve Cook Hiking the GTA @hikingthegta

In 1834, the Cobourg Railroad Company was chartered to build a railway from Cobourg to Peterborough, crossing Rice Lake. This was one of the first two railroad charters issued in Canada.

The concept began in 1831 when several businessmen from Cobourg contracted F. P. Rubidge to survey possible routes. The Rebellion of 1837 happened and the plan was forgotten until 1846. This is when Samuel Gore revived the idea as the Cobourg and Rice Lake Plank Road and Ferry Company. His plank road didn’t survive past the first couple of winters.

In 1852 a new plan was chartered for the Cobourg and Peterborough Railway. The official sod turning for construction was performed on Feb. 7, 1853. Farmers along the way contributed wood from the forests and labour from their horse teams. The old plank road bed was used, but in 1854 a labour shortage was caused by the Crimean War and labour rates rose to $1.00 for a 12 hour day. German labour was brought in and tragically, 14 of them perished that year to Cholera. When completed at the end of 1854 the trestle was nearly 5 kilometers long, making it the longest railway bridge in North America at the time. A 36 metre swing bridge was installed to allow boat navigation.

In 1855 John Fowler took over as chief engineer and he began to fill in the cribs below the trusses from Harwood to Tic Island in an effort to secure them from the winter’s damage. The railway manager, D’Arcy Boulton, continually defended the railway, claiming that Samuel Zimmerman hadn’t properly completed the line. Boulton suggested that a half a million cubic yards of fill could be dumped into the remaining open cribs, and that would solve the trestle problem permanently.

The first train from Cobourg to Peterborough ran the 45.8 km track on December 29, 1854. Celebrations were a little premature, as ice damaged the trestle just three days later. The line was shut down until it could be repaired in the spring. The seventeen truss sections that ran south between the drawbridge and Tic Island

were shoved hard enough that the span on the abutment on the island was displaced by four feet (see picture above). Ice damaged the bridge again in the winters of 1856-57, 1859-60 and fatally damaged it in 1860-61. Parts of the trestle collapsed and some claim that a rival railway had removed some of the bolts from the truss sections. The trestle was permanently closed, and the railway from Hiawatha to Peterborough was abandoned.

Bridge shifted & damaged by ice

The line was sold in 1866 to the Marmora Iron Works for $100,000, but the citizens of Cobourg had invested ten times that much. The company planned to bring iron from a mine on Crowe Lake to Trent Bridge at the northern end of Rice Lake by rail. The venture went well until 1873, when the the iron market collapsed. This led to the closure of the mine, and by 1877 the company was again bankrupt. Parts of the railway line were absorbed into the Grant Trunk Railway in 1893.

The water level in Rice Lake was raised by about eight feet in the 1920’s when the Trent Severn Waterway was constructed. The rail berm was originally built 4 feet above the high water mark.

Aerial of where the railway ran through these idlands

In 1996, it was possible to make your way a considerable distance from the shore along the old causeway. It’s now been 165 years since a train made the crossing, but the remains of the Cobourg & Peterborough Railway still have their story to tell.