Big Chute Marine Railroad
Sitting on my mother's recliner, recovering from my aborted cytoreduction+HIPEC surgery, I had plenty of time to watch YouTube videos with my parents and join them (well, largely my father) in sharing interests. Selected highlights include the extremely well web cam covered city of Ust-Kut, Russia, a visit to Bourbon Street most evenings, and following ships through the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway. Plus, of course more 40s and 50s detective stuff than it seems possible for a human to get through. It was a nice time.
Ocasionally, we'd split the live feeds up with people's travel videos, short documentaries, and silent walk throughs. And I got inspired. While, in terms of years, I had little time, but in terms of free hours, I had more than I needed.
That inspiration became fixation one day when we were looking at videos of odd locks. Bathtub hydraulic locks, like the kind at Kirkfield and Peterborough, fancier versions of the same that sweep circular arcs, large shipping locks. But the one that caught my attention most and quickest was not really a lock at all, it was the Big Chute Marine Railroad.
Big Chute is part of the Trent-Severn Waterway, a national historic site(s) located in Ontario, allowing water traffic to travel from Trenton, Ontario, to travel to Port Severn on Georgian Bay, bypassing Lake Erie and the St. Claire River (which made a lot of sense in the post War of 1812 days). It's also only about an hour from where I lived at the time, and was a perfect picnic outing to start my living at home surgical recovery.
Operation is simple, the railway has a car, pulled by cables in a central wheelhouse, to which boats attach. When the car is full, or there's no one waiting, the cables pull the car to the other side. It was fascinating for me to watch, I ended up canceling another stop for the day and listening to podcasts while eating tuna sandwiches at a picnic area nearby.
The reason they didn't construct a conventional lock here (like they did on all but a few other locations on the canal) are that the rock would have been prohibitively expensive to blast, being hard precambrian shield, as opposed to much younger sandstones and limestones. The vertical drop added to this issue. These days, it's good that they didn't go this way, it allows the Big Chute to remain passable to spawning native fish, but an impenetrable barrier to of concern invasive fish. This engineer likes it when oddities of engineering are functional as well as weird, and Big Chute really counts for that.
Big Chute was my first stepping stone to recovery, and the fall of 2023, when I was off on a silly yet exciting, to me, adventure every couple of days. I taught myself how to make videos, to document, and to have fun doing it. Getting through eight months of chemo, and actively deciding not to give up after the failure of the surgery I gambled so much on, started to pay off here. I choose to be my day's best self every morning (even if best self is a slug who eats Doritos in bed and watchs Archer on repeat for three days and does nothing else), and Big Chute is an important inflection point. Yes, I was doomed. But I was still alive. Still here. And making something of it was going to be a delight.
