Get the facts, know the rules, examine your alternatives, co-operate on a regional basis and realize that your time frame may be months if not weeks.
This was the advice offered by four shortline rail experts at a public meeting in our town last week.
The meeting was the second organized as a result of a shortline meeting in Regina which two of our residents attended. One of the farmers told me that he came home from the Regina meeting with a “real feeling of hope” whereas before he went there was “total frustration” and a feeling that the “system is insurmountable.”
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Two of our lines, the Mantario sub and the White Bear sub, have been identified as lines the railway wants to abandon. The next steps in the abandonment process could begin at any time.
If we lose even a part of what we have, the farmer said, it will be serious.
The central message of all speakers was that farmers must be prepared to look after themselves and their futures. In the past, it was left to someone else to look after farmers’ interests. Governments and farm organizations have both changed, however, the meeting was told, and today if farmers don’t do it no one else will.
Many community issues are tied up with rail-line abandonment: future development, maintaining local businesses, services and people, employment and the tax base.
Many are starting to look on shortlines as the salvation of their community when the rail line goes.
However, experts told the meeting, a shortline is a business opportunity only. There are no guarantees that people will support it or that it will be profitable and, like any other business, it will exist only as long as it makes money.
The wonder is not that shortlines are seen as the salvation of us all but that we are even looking at them. This is another sign of the fundamental changes that are taking place in rural Canada.
About five years ago at a CN Rail information meeting in our town, one farmer raised the possibility that our branch line would one day be a memory. Most of us felt he was thinking the unthinkable and was overcome with doom and gloom. Our line hauls a lot of grain, it would be there for our lifetimes if not forever, the conventional thinking ran.
Like the Crow rate, nothing is forever.
Terminals and trucking are a fact of life.
So are shortlines. The future is now.
