For a few years in the 1850s, a trip from Cobourg to Peterborough could include a train ride across Rice Lake. Yes, across the lake. If you've ever run from Harwood to the north shore on a flat calm morning, you know how much open water that is. The railway opened in 1854.
For a few years in the 1850s, a trip from Cobourg to Peterborough could include a train ride across Rice Lake.
Yes, across the lake. If you've ever run from Harwood to the north shore on a flat calm morning, you know how much open water that is. The railway opened in 1854. By 1861 the ice had beaten the bridge, and the northern half of the line was finished. The southern half kept going for almost forty more years, doing a completely different job. (Ontario Heritage Trust)
And the bridge isn't entirely gone. Some of it is still in the water near Tic Island, which is why a history post on a boat dealer's blog ends with a warning about your lower unit.
Why Build a Railway Across a Lake?
Cobourg had a new harbour and wanted something to put through it. A link north to Rice Lake and Peterborough would bring the back country's lumber and grain down to Lake Ontario.
The idea is older than you'd guess. The Cobourg Museum Foundation's harbour exhibition shows a proposed railway on an 1832 real-estate map. By 1835 a charter had been issued and surveys done, but money was hard to raise, rebellions broke out in Upper and Lower Canada, and the charter ran out before anyone laid track. It was seventeen years before the idea came back, and this time the goal was Peterborough. (Cobourg Museum Foundation)
The promoter D'Arcy Boulton told the Cobourg Star on Christmas Eve, 1851: "in less than three years we shall ride on the rail car to the music of the whistle." He was right. The line was chartered in 1852 and opened in 1854. (museum exhibition; Ontario Heritage Trust)
The provincial plaque is less kind about what came next. It says the railway "suffered from excessive optimism, land speculation and faulty engineering." That's the government's own plaque, standing at the Cobourg marina.
Three Miles of Timber and Mud
The Cobourg and District Historical Society calls the Rice Lake bridge one of the largest engineering projects in North America at the time. Harwood got the south end partly because Tic Island could be worked into the crossing. (CDHS bridge history)
The plan, per the society:
- A pile trestle 3,754 feet long from Harwood to Tic Island
- North of the island, stone-filled timber cribs carrying seventeen Burr truss spans
- A swing bridge on a pier, with two fifty-foot openings so boats could still get through
- More truss spans, then a 6,728-foot trestle to the north shore at what's now Hiawatha
The original tender called for a rock and gravel causeway. The contractors and the engineer underestimated how deep the mud on the bottom of Rice Lake goes, and to cut costs they switched to a cheaper wooden trestle. The society's verdict: "This change of plan ultimately proved ruinous." (CDHS)
Anyone who's pulled an anchor out of Rice Lake will believe the mud part.
Work started in the spring of 1853. Catharine Parr Traill described the scene at Harwood that summer in the Anglo-American Magazine: "The shore is alive with workmen." Pile-drivers pounded timber into the lake bottom, and a temporary village of a boarding house and two stores went up on shore. The society tallies 1,932,000 feet of square timber in the bridge structures alone. That's 365 miles of it. (CDHS)
An Opening Excursion in December
The bridge opened late in December 1854 with a free excursion from Cobourg to Peterborough, passengers riding in open railway cars. Open cars, on a lake, at the start of an Ontario winter. Somebody was keen. (CDHS)
The museum puts that first run over the bridge into Peterborough's Ashburnham station the same month. Boulton's three years came in just about on schedule. (museum exhibition)
Six Winters
The bridge had been open for a matter of days when the lake pushed back. On January 1, 1855, ice shoved the southern truss spans toward Tic Island so hard that the last one slid four feet onto the embankment. South of the island, the trestle was driven toward shore with enough force to splinter 12 by 18 inch oak stringers and bend the iron rails double. During repairs, crews found some of the cribs had never been filled with stone. (CDHS)
It was fixed within weeks, and for the next six years Harwood kept flipping between the middle of the line and the end of it. The railway still earned its keep: in 1857 alone, 14 million feet of lumber and 200,000 bushels of wheat went out through Cobourg. (CDHS; museum exhibition)
What the ice did. AI reconstruction from HBW's film "The Bridge the Ice Took", not a photograph.
The last lessee, John Henry Dumble, nearly solved it. Starting in 1858 he filled the trestle with stone and gravel, and the bridge came through the winter of 1858-59 with no ice damage. In November 1859 he put 150 men to work over the winter building an embankment the full length of the crossing, six feet above the high-water mark. Then he lost the lease to a rival group from the Port Hope, Lindsay and Beaverton Railway. (CDHS)
What happened next depends on who you read. The plaque says ice made the bridge unsafe and destroyed it in 1860-61. The museum says it was declared unsafe in 1861 and never used again. The historical society adds a detail the plaque leaves out: pins and rails were removed from the bridge, reportedly on the order of one of the Port Hope men, and a section of it was carried off by the ice and drifted east to the south shore. (Ontario Heritage Trust; museum exhibition; CDHS)
Ice got the official blame. It may have had help.
Harwood's Next Chapter
Losing the crossing didn't kill the line south of the lake. The railway was reorganized in 1866 and the remaining track carried iron ore from Marmora. The Cobourg and Area Museum explains how: Pittsburgh steelmakers had the ore shipped up Rice Lake to the railway dock at Harwood, which skipped the broken bridge entirely. That traffic ran until the mines played out in the 1880s. (Ontario Heritage Trust; Cobourg and Area Museum)
The Grand Trunk bought the line in 1893 and closed it in 1898. (Ontario Heritage Trust)
So for the last thirty-odd years of its life, the railway across Rice Lake depended on boats on Rice Lake.
What We See at HBW
Here's the part that isn't history. The bridge was never rebuilt, and what's left of the old railway bed and trestle is still out there. In places near Tic Island it sits just inches below the surface. We won't give you a depth, because there isn't a fixed one. Water levels change from spring to fall and year to year.
That makes it a real navigation hazard on Rice Lake today. If you're running anywhere near Tic Island, slow down, watch your sounder, stay in water you know, and don't cut a corner because the chart looks open. A trestle remnant a few inches down is the kind of thing a lower unit finds before the driver does.
If you're new to the lake, start with our Rice Lake boating guide and the Rice Lake boat launch guide. And if you like this kind of local history, how a family marina ended up on the south shore is our own chapter of it.
If you've already found it the hard way, put in a request at hbwservice.ca and we'll have a look at the lower unit.
Sources
Phone: 905-342-2153
Address: 5369 Harris Boat Works Rd, Gores Landing, ON
Service: hbwservice.ca
Sites: harrisboatworks.ca | mercuryrepower.ca
