The people who keep the wheels rolling over the Schreiber Division know the meaning of the phrase, "man against nature". In this rugged part of the country, that is what railroading is all about.

The division spans 513 miles (825 kilometres) of main line track across a wilderness of forest, rock, and muskeg which was once declared an "impassable barrier" to railway construction. As nature would have it, it still becomes impassable for brief periods from time to time.

On 10 May 1983, for instance, about 1,000 tons (987 metric tons) of rock crashed down at the mouth of the Mink tunnel. A week or so later, a blizzard on the Nemegos subdivision blew trees and telegraph poles across the track and buried it in nine inches (23 centimetres) of snow.

Under Control:  Westside Dispatcher Bill Stefurak ensures everything runs smoothly on the rail section under his responsibility.

"Everything happens on the Schreiber Division," says Chief Dispatcher John Kowalchuk. "Like a snowstorm in the middle of May. It jammed the power switches so that our dispatchers couldn't throw a switch, and it knocked out our data line so that we couldn't tell on our board where the trains were. But we communicated by voice and the train crews dug out the switches. All in a day's work around here."

Even without such unseasonable occurrences, the division is constantly vulnerable to the assaults of nature.

With 112 bridges and an average of 16 culverts per mile, the roadbed is like one long control dam between the great watersheds of the north and Lakes Huron and Superior.

Spring run-offs pose a chronic threat of washouts. In the summer, fierce thunderstorms may cause flash floods. When the weather is dry, every spark is a potential forest fire. Autumn is perhaps the easiest season, but it hardly exists. "The ballast starts freezing at the end of September, and from then on, you can forget about major track work," says General Roadmaster Romeo Thibault. Winter sets in a month or so later. It usually lasts until mid-April at least.

The region north of Lake Superior has one of Canada's harshest climates. For many years, White River held the national record for the lowest recorded temperature, minus 72 Fahrenheit (-22 Celsius). The mercury regularly sinks to 40 below. It hit 60 below two years ago and 55 below last winter. And it can stay very far below zero for five or six days at a stretch.

While taking its toll in frost-bitten flesh, the extreme cold also hampers operations. It occasionally cracks the rails, sending maintenance-of-way out to replace them at 40 to 50 below.

LITTLE RELIEF

"And just try keeping air in a train in that kind of weather," said Peter Josefchak, assistant superintendent at Schreiber. "The hoses and gaskets contract, and you get leaks all over. A train that starts out of Toronto with 65 to 80 cars will lose so much air that it will leave White River as two or three trains of 30 to 35 cars each."

A mild spell does not necessarily spell relief. Chunks of melting ice and snow falling from the tops of rock cuts and tunnels smash the rock fences, automatically turning the signals to red until the blockage has been inspected and, if necessary, cleared.

Thawing and re-freezing builds up ice blocks in the culverts, and weakens rail bolts and anchors. It causes the roadbed to heave, so that it has to be shimmed to level it off.

When spring finally comes, there is a rush to do all the work that can't be done in the cold weather.

"We have approximately two months less time to get things in shape than on most other divisions," Assistant Divisional Engineer Jack Cline explains. "Five months instead of seven or even eight months elsewhere. And we have more work to do because of the wear and tear of the longer and colder winter. It takes more out of the roadbed, the track, the equipment, everything."

The nature of the line itself adds to the beating it suffers. As Romeo Thibeault puts it, "this division is mostly curves." There are some 1,300 curves between the east end of the division at Cartier and the west end on the outskirts of Thunder Bay at Current River. "It's a problem," says Mr. Thibault. "We're always having to transpose curve-worn track."

Unloading:  Operator Ernie Krause backs the work train's backhoe off a flatcar.

Peter Josefchak cites the big rock-slide at the Mink Tunnel in May as a example of how railroading here differs from other parts of Canada.

"In most places you'd bring in bulldozers to clear the rock, but we are nowhere near a road, and anyway, bulldozers would be no good in that narrow space between the rock wall and the lake," he said.

"Some of those rocks were half the size of locomotives. So we dynamited them to break them up, and we called in two big backhoes to scoop up the rubble and dump it into the water."

Any track obstruction or road equipment breakdown on the division may affect CP Rail's whole transcontinental system. Apart from a 40-mile (64-kilometre) spur line to the mining and logging centre of Manitouwadge, the Schreiber Division is virtually all main line.

HIGH-PRIORITY TRAINS

This means that, with the exception of three local trains, all the traffic that passes through is high-priority fast freight and passenger service.

"We're a kind of land bridge between Eastern and Western Canada," as Division Superintendent M.S. (Bud) Andrews puts it. "Our job is to see that everything that moves from one region to the other does so with a minimum of delays."

Given this mandate, the people who maintain the line really have to hustle.

On a work train assigned to replace a culvert, for instance, the work crews allow five hours of uninterrupted time to remove the rail, dig a hole in the main line 60 feet (18 metres) long and 16 feet (five metres) deep, install the new culvert, fill in the hole, ballast the roadbed, and put the rails back in place.

Thanks to a new time-saving system devised by Operator Ernie Krause, the 38-ton (34.5 metric ton) backhoe was offloaded from its flat car and put to work within a few minutes.

It scooped up tons of gravel mixed with the remnants of the original trestles built in the 1880s and later filled in. When the new culvert was installed, section gangs under foremen Ken Michano and Robert Rasmussen swiftly replaced the track, driving spikes, tightening nuts, shovelling ballast. Slow flags were placed on the line and Conductor Dave Speer and Locomotive Engineer Ian Fummerton headed the work train for home.

The whole operation, typical of the kind of jobs done on the line all summer, took four hours.

Making It Fit:  Section gangs under foremen Ken Michano and Robert Rasmussen struggle with pry bars to fit in a section of rail after a new culvert was installed on the division.

MINIMIZING DELAYS

The task of minimizing delays extends to equipment maintenance and fueling. To reduce the time trains spent in terminal, a new 1.1 million gallon (5 million litre) fueling system is being installed in Chapleau with high-speed, high-pressure pumps.

The challenge of keeping the traffic moving on time will become all the more vital as the line becomes busier. Five-unit 12,500-ton (11,340-metric ton) grain trains are already running over the division, and Superintendent Andrews expects increased grain movements in future.

A gold rush at Hemlo, east of Marathon, promises a whole new type of business as ore starts coming out of the mines that seem likely to be built.

Come what may, railroading in this big chunk of the Canadian Shield will continue to be a problem, and an adventure.

One might think that with all the natural hazards around them, the accident rate among the division's 800 employees would be high. But such is their safety-consciousness that there has been only one lost-time accident since last October.