Myra Canyon British Columbia - The lost art of building wooden railway trestles will be revived this fall when a team starts to build a latticework of cross-braced timbers that once helped knit Canada together.
 
During the firestorm in Kelowna in the summer of 2003, 12 of the 16 wooden trestles that bridged dizzying chasms and clung to the steep walls of Myra Canyon were burned.
 
The loss destroyed some of the greatest examples of wooden trestles in the world and damaged a popular biking route on an old rail bed that is a national historic site.
 
Yesterday the federal and British Columbia governments promised $13.5 million in disaster relief to rebuild the trestles over the next three years.
 
Originally built between 1910 and 1916, the trestles of the Kettle Valley Railway have been described as "a phenomenal feat of railway engineering and construction."
 
Replicating that feat will be an enormous challenge, despite the great advances of technology over the past 100 years, because the terrain is as daunting as ever.
 
A report prepared for Parks Canada, by historian Robert Passfield, describes how the trestles were built "to carry the rail line across wide gaps, deep cleavages, and depressions in the canyon walls, and all were built on a curve, or tangents to a curve, with from 7 to 12 degrees of curvature to conform to the natural contours of the canyon walls."
 
Incredibly, one trestle was built in an S-curve, with a 12 degree right turn followed by a 12 degree left turn.
 
After they were built, people were so amazed by the trestles they became known as "McCulloch's Wonder," after chief engineer Andrew McCulloch.
 
Their destruction in the fire was widely seen as the loss of a national treasure.
 
James Klett, a former Canadian Pacific Railway (CP) bridge builder who has come out of retirement to help on the restoration project, said he's thrilled that wooden trestles will once again be built in Canada.
 
"This is something like going back and building your house again in the 14th century," he said.
 
"There used to be lots of wooden trestles. But over the years they would take the wood out and replace it with concrete and steel. So yes, building wooden trestles is very much a lost art. This is going to be very exciting."
 
Blair Baldwin, a member of a government task force formed to tackle the restoration project, said five of the trestles will be built "exactly to the historical CP specs," and the rest will be modified look-alikes that will have small modifications.
 
"They're all going to be built out of wood. It's totally cool."
 
Mr. Baldwin said the task force initially identified two major challenges.
 
One was the question of how to finance reconstruction, the other was simply how to do it.
 
"When we set about to do the work, the engineering challenge was probably the largest challenge," Mr. Baldwin said.
 
"For those who haven't seen Myra Canyon, historically, many people on the engineering side would refer to it as one of their seven wonders of the engineering world."
 
The trestles are up to 48 metres high and 110 metres in length.
 
Explaining the high cost of replacing them, Mr. Baldwin said, "I think it's pretty accurate to say on a per kilometre basis, the construction costs of the Kettle Valley Railway, notably through Myra Canyon, were the most expensive of any railway built in the Western world. You have steep canyons, tremendously deep chasms. You can imagine that using standard technology in 1910, how tough it was... and while technology has advanced over the past 100 years, it's still a real challenge just to get men and equipment in."
 
Ken Campbell, former president of the Myra Canyon Trestle Restoration Society, said the original rail crews did an amazing job.
 
"They had very special skills... we've seen pictures of the process of putting them together. It really was quite remarkable because all of the timbers had to be pre-cut and drilled before they were treated. That had to be very precise. They put them together on the site after they were treated and put them into place."
 
Mr. Campbell said that because the new bridges don't need to carry locomotives, the load capacities will be less, and not as many timbers will be needed.
 
"But we want to build them so that they look like the old ones."
 
He said the plans from CP's archives, plus interviews with old-timers who worked on repairing wooden trestles on the Kettle Valley Railway up until the 1960s, will help crews tackle the job.
 
The Kettle Valley Railway, a subsidiary of CP, linked the Kootenay mining region to the coast.
 
It operated for 85 years, but was shut down in phases as freight traffic declined.
 
Most of it was out of operation by the late 1960s.
 
After the rails were removed, the 500 kilometre rail bed was purchased by the B.C. government and it has since become a popular biking and hiking route.
 
It is part of the Trans-Canada Trail, and attracts a growing number of mountain-bikers.
 
The most popular section is a 10 kilometre stretch through Myra Canyon, just outside Kelowna, which attracts about 50,000 people each year, generating $5 million in economic benefits for the region.
 
Author unknown.