Rail in Saskatoon is a constant issue.
While rail is our collective history, it is also our collective future. Rail is the backbone that moves our commodities across our country. The problem is that our city has changed how it interacts with rail, and it has overgrown rail operations on both the East and the West. The largest problems are due to disruptions in traffic flows throughout the day and night due to ever-expanding train lengths.
The City has not done a good job of investigating options for this and has relied on one of two ideas. Either we leave things as they are, or we move rail outside the city to the south, where we buy up large swaths of land to create a rail easement and make the rail companies share one rail line.
Of course, the going south idea never really had merit. The rail companies do not have to move. They are not legally required to change how they operate; they are entitled to stay exactly where they are. So, coming up with that situation that only benefits some of City Administration while greatly disadvantaging both rail companies was far-fetched and was a complete waste of time from the start.
During the last election, I made a comment about tunnelling under the city. My background in underground mine design told me that Saskatchewan already had rail cars underground at a mine site, which most reporters were unaware of. While I didn’t claim it was a solution, I proposed that at least the City Administration should have looked at the option of tunnel boring under the city to create 24-hour access for rail and unimpeded access for people driving on the surface simultaneously.
The benefit of tunnel boring would be that rail companies might have the option of moving the rail yards further out of the city to a new point where they would start from an exit, and that could free up all of the lands currently held by rail within the city, recovering the rail yards for infill development at a later stage. It would also give rail the ability not to have to maintain any crossings within the city and would give them an unlimited amount of time to move trains through the day and night, and those trains could be even longer than the 1-mile-long trains that we see now.
Mining professionals estimated that tunnel boring under the city would cost similar to buying up land for a complete new easement with overpasses around the south of the city. But it isn’t cheap.
Since the last election, I have focused on finding other alternatives that might benefit our city, and I have struck a concept that has been widely viewed and has been given great promise by design professionals and rail professionals alike. It uses a method called secant piling and, in a sense, we would create a tunnel right below the rail line while they continue to operate so the trains would not stop, doing construction right at the edge at the surface. This is also within the existing rail easement already controlled by the rail lines, so purchasing land and landowner rights wouldn’t be an issue.
My concept is to start at the Warman Street crossing and to remove that crossing and all the crossings down to just about 11th Street. In the end, the train would be below the surface, there’d be no rail crossings at the surface, and we could drive across the top and, possibly, even build buildings over top of where the rail would be. This also has application in places like Preston, where the rail line comes through near the University by Innovation Place, as well as the crossing proposed now for 8th Street on the edge of the city and further south. I put forward a detailed animation on this concept, and I have not heard a word from City Administration – or any other candidate, for that matter – about rail. I believe rail is critical to the success of our city, both in terms of its need and removing its impact directly from the core of our city. I do not understand how we can discuss a new arena while glazing over the fact that we have not even discussed rail.