Has anyone hiked along the abandoned railbeds from Salmo to Nelson or from Castlegar to Midway? I live in Nelson and plan on doing the both of them in the next couple of years or so at the first chance I get to do so. I just wanted to know how the conditions of both and hear of anyones experience.
Has any of the inquiring minds hiked along abandoned railbeds in any other parts of the world? How was it?
Doc:
Can’t help specifically with the area you ask about…but doing the exploring along the Old ROW’s sure is an interest of mine.
Nothing of any great lengths but we’ve done some exploring on old routes locally in my home state of Pennsylvania in years past.
Just love to see where the engineers took the route to achieve the grades that were aceptable, etc…
Back in my home area there is an abandoned {about 60 years ago}, coal hauling route that had 4 horseshoe curves almost end to end…{You can see it on a Sat. Image site…near Friedens, Pa., Northwest of it}…
All that was really interesting to see how they did it to achieve the routes and all the rest. Beautiful old brick and stone arches to support big fills over them crossing streams…Just interesting stuff for a rail fan. Sorry, can’t address the area out west you speak of.
Did observe several abandoned routes out west {Nev.} when I did some work out there years ago but did not get to hike any distance on them. One specifically around Hoover Dam…The RR that served to haul building materials to it when under construction, etc…
I am not familiar with the places you mention, but I like to hike old railroad grades for all the reasons Quentin mentioned, and for the reason that they seem to have a way of transporting one back to the time they were in use. The copper country up on the Keweenaw Peninsula of upper Michigan is full of old roadbeds. Some are sets of perfectly intact cuts and fills just sweeping though the forest of totally desolate areas. It is always a research challenge to find out what companies operated them. One can find the little tidbits of left over structure such as trestles, stone culverts, etc.
There is the Pori Loop Line, a logging railroad with 20% grades dropping down to cross a river. Log trains with rod engines ran 60 mph down one side to have enough momentum to get up the other side. They also sometimes took water from the river, so they had to stop at the bottom. To start, they ran forward until they stalled, then backed up as fast as they could until they stalled on that side. They repeated these back and forth moves until they finally got out on one side or the other. I found this old grade back in the 1980s. Ties were still intact on the 20% grades. Remnants of the river trestle were still there.
The six-mile roadbed of the 3-foot-gage Quincy & Torch Lake is still intact, but gradually being cut up with other roads, logging, house building, etc. That line had the track intact from the end of operation in 1945 until the mid 1970s. To this day, there are th
…Wow, now that would be no fun…lucky you {Bucyrus}, really didn’t get going on the wrong logging path deep in the woods and really get in trouble.
That would not be a fun ROW to explore. But many, many of them are, I’m sure. Some, 60 plus years abandoned back in my home state of Pa. really are in pretty good shape yet. Especially around Somerset Co. area that I’m somewhat familiar with.