 | CANADA |
| CANADA |
BAIE-COMEAU PORT
Leading from the pulp mill we have a standard gauge railway line that runs down to the docks in the distance. And it is a standard-gauge because I measured it.
This line looks as if it has been used recently but judging by the vegetation growing up between the rails, it doesn't look as if it is in regular use if you ask me
Those are the docks in the distance and our steam engine locomotive is to the right as you can see.
I had a wander down to the end of the line - at least, as far as I was able to go - and noted a few more-modern locomotives here.
The one nearest the camera is SOPOR 4998, a General Motors GP38AC, one of the very last of its type built, and dating from November 1971. It seems to be receiving an electric recharge of something or other at the moment.
She came to Baie Comeau in 2008, having been acquired from the Grand Trunk Western Railroad of Chicago, which is actually a subsiduary of the Canadian National Railway Company. Over there, she carried fleet numbers 4998 and 5801.
She's also spent some time with another Canadian National Railway subsiduary, the Central Vermont Railroad, where she carried her current fleet number.
The other locomotive - the black one parked behind our 4998 in one of the photos above - is SOPOR 7004. My Jane's Train Recognition Guide
She came here in 2000 from the Canadian National Railway, where she carried her current fleet number.
And SOPOR? It's the Societe Du Port Ferroviaire De Baie-Comeau.
There's also a pile of railway wagons down here at the goods yard behind the docks and they look in quite reasonable condition to me, so the railway line is having some kind of use.
Subsequent enquiries revealed that the railway network, such as it is, hauls aluminium ingots from Alcoa up the hill where we were earlier, and also wood pulp from the pulp mill that we have just visted.
And despite what I might have said earlier, this railway network IS connected to the rest of Canada's railway network (well, after a fashion anyway), or such of Canada's railway network that remains after the decimations that took place in the 1980s and 1990s.
The connection is assured because SOPOR has a ship, the George-Alexandre Lebel, which is a railway transporter and plies across the St Lawrence from Baie Comeau to Matane.
Wagons from the Canadian National network at Matane can be shunted onto the ship there to be offloaded onto the rails here, and make the return journey too.
When I've been here before, I didn't really have much of an idea where the dock for the train ferry was situated, but in 2016 I had a really good prowl around and managed to track it down, narrowly avoiding being squidged by a line of cars coming off the car ferry that had arrived a few minutes earlier.
I couldn't go over for a closer inspection because it's all fenced off. But that's it just over there, neatly hidden behind the installations for the car ferry. Unfortunately, the George-Alexandre Lebel wasn't here in port while I was here, but you can't have everything
But turning the clock back to 2012, I need to go to check on the ferry service. If I'm going to be lost right out at the far end of the North Shore somewhere I'll need to know how to come back.
The ferry from here crosses over to Matane on the Gaspe, and runs for 363 days each year - not Christmas and not New Year - weather permitting. So when I was here in 2010, I reckoned that this may well be how I would come back - although in the opposite direction from Matane.
Apparently you need to be here the day before to confirm your reservation but you can always turn up á l'improviste and take your chance - something that is not recommended during the tourist season, for you may end up with quite a long wait
With that out of the way, we'll go for a wander around for a look at all of the shipping here, because there is no shortage of that
That ship over there is the Australiaborg owned by the Royal Wagenborg company, and flies the Dutch flag. Built in 2007 she grosses almost 12,000 tonnes. She was built, by the way, by the Hudong Zhonghua Shipbuilding Group of Shanghai, China.
I was admiring the lifeboat at the stern. If the ship is sinking, clambers into it and it shoots down into the water like an adventure ride at an amusement park.
Her berth was occupied in 2012 by the Warnow Mars, and she looks as if she's a bulk carrier. Grossing about 23,000 tonnes, she's flying the Liberian flag.
In this photo she was only a year old, being built in 2011 by another Chinese shipyard, Zhejiang Ouhua Shipbuilding of Zhoushan. Her operator, however, is the German company Marlow Shipmanagement of Hamburg.
When I was here in 2016, I came down to see which ship was anchored in the docks next to the ferry port. What we have is another ship from the Royal Wagenborg company - the Africaborg, who had sailed in from Ulsan in Korea, from where she set sail on 27th August.
The Africaborg is nothing like as big as she looks, being a mere 12,000 tonnes. She is another ship built by the Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding Group of Shanghai, like the Australiaborg above, also in 2007 and flies the Dutch flag. She really IS the sister ship of the Australiaborg
This ship here is something of a, well, less-modern ship. She's the Federal Polaris and was build in 1985 by the Nkk Shimizu Works of Shizuoka in Japan, grossing almost 18,000 tonnes.
Owned by Viken Shipping of Bergen in Norway, she's managed by the Fednav Group of Montreal and flies the flag of the Marshall Islands. Quite unusually for a ship of her age, she seems to have carried the same name throughout her life, despite changing owners on several occasions.
Her main claim to fame is colliding with a Yugoslav bulk carrier just offshore at St Clair, Michigan on 27th September 1986 when she was less than one year old.
So having told you quite a great deal about the Federal Polaris, I can't tell you anything at all about this ship as it is far too far offshore for me to read her name.
She's quite clearly another bulk carrier and, just like the Federal Polaris, gives the impression of having sailed the seven seas for a considerable period. A new coat of paint some time in the near future would cheer her up considerably.
The green and red-lead ship is called, somewhat ironically, the Bluebill and she could do with a nice new coat of paint too because despite her looks, she was built as recently as 2004 to replace a ship of the same name, built in 1977 and scrapped in 2001.
She was built at the Shanghai Shipyard in China, grossing just over 22,500 tonnes and although she's run by the Navarone Marine Enterprise of Athens in Greece, she flies the flag of those islanders who end in rebellion - the Cypriots.
This vessel is the Spring Hawk, anchored in the St Lawrence here off Baie-Comeau.
Now, she looks nice and fresh and clean, and so she should too, because when I took this photo she was less than two years old, being built in 2010 by the Mitsui Tamano Engineering & Shipbuilding Company of Tamano, Japan.
She grosses just over 31,000 tonnes and flies the flag of Panama, despite being run by the Tsurumi Kisen Company of Imabari, Japan.
It was rather disappointing here in the bay when I came by here in 2016. There wasn't even one ship anchored in the bay queueing up to unload.
In fact, the port of Baie Comeau is nothing like as busy as it used to be. Back in the old days it was the base for all kinds of goélettes, the boats that used to sail from village to village along the coast transporting supplies, ferrying people about, and returning with the produce and output of the crafts carried on in the various villages.
But all of this changed in the 1960s when Highway 138 was built eastwards along the north shore of the St Lawrence River. Nowadays, there's not even one coastal goélette that calls here.
Instead, the port is gven over to pleasure boats. There were quite a few of them in here and I stopped for five minutes or so to watch this yacht come sailing ... "dieseling" - ed .... into the harbour.
What had interested me about this was that I had seen a couple of men in a lorry reverse a big boat trailer down the slipway right into the water. You can see the side-stakes sticking up out of the water.
Winter is approaching, as we all know, and it comes very quickly here so there was something of a rush to remove boats from the water. The way that the sailors were manoeuvring ... "PERSONoeuvring" - ed ... this yacht around in the harbour looked as though they were planning on bringing this yacht out of the water too.
It might be a surprise to you but I've never seen this done before so I was quite keen to watch them do it. But while I was watching them, I had an interruption.
My friend Rhys from South Carolina was on the phone. It's the first time this year that I've heard his dulcet tones so I was quite keen to speak to him.
And while Rhys and I were busy chatting about his bus (he's converting a redundant school bus into a mobile home) and the solar energy system that he's installing in it, I was busy watching them organise the removal of the yacht.
It was quite an art to drive (because they used the diesel engines rather than the sails, which is a bit of a cheat) in between the stakes of the trailer. And once it was in, they used the trailer-winch and some straps to fasten it down tightly to the cradle on the trailer.
And as our conversation rambled on, they pulled the yacht clear of the water and a couple of guys there gave it a thorough inspection.
And then they reversed the trailer back down into the water, slackened off the tethering ropes, re-positioned the yacht so that, presumably, it fitted better on the cradle, re-tightened the tethering ropes and pulled it out of the water again.
This time it passed its inspection and they towed it off around to the hardstanding at the side where, presumably, it will over-winter.
It was a nice, warm and not-too-windy late afternoon and so I went for a further stroll around the harbour. And there was plenty of things to see, such as these concrete objects that looked rather like a 21st-Century chevaux de frises.
Their purpose is to reinforce the sea wall here at the harbour. If the tides or storms displace them, the horns of the objects would interlock with each other and they wouldn't move any farther after they had done that. It's quite ingenious really.
One of the most energy-hungry industrial processes is the smelting of bauxite and its transformation into aluminium. With all of the energy that is created here by the hydro plants on the Manicouagan and the Outardes, that's an obvious candidate for around here.
This is a plant called "Alcoa Premier Fusion" and Alcoa is an acronym for the Aluminium Corporation of America. You will therefore rightly assume that this is part of an aluminium-producing plant.
Alcoa has its own wharf behind the factory and when I was here in October 2016 someone had left the gate open so I could drive down as far as the security barrier to see whether there was a ship in the dock.
I was in luck today, because there is a ship in here. I couldn't see it very clearly, but I could see enough to tell that she is called the Federal Nakagawa.
The Federal Nakagawa is a bulk carrier of 20,000 tons and she is en route from Jamaica to Toledo in the USA, on the Great Lakes via half a dozen or so ports along the St Lawrence. I thought at first that she might have been the CSL ship that I had encountered on the St Lawrence while I was on the ferry from Matane the other day, but she didn't arrive here until the 29th, and so she is ruled out.
By the way, Jamaica is quite significant when we are talking about aluminium factories, because that country is a major source of bauxite, the raw material from which aluminium is extracted.
And so here we have yet another parting of the ways.
Our readers on the 2010 journey will be turning left at the top of the bank to look for Highway 389 that will take them on the Trans-Labrador Highway . And best of luck to them too.
The rest of us will be carrying on eastwards along Highway 138 to see how far it goes and what happens right at the end - because a lot certainly does happen.
We will all meet up again, don't worry - but not for quite a while, and not at Philippi either. So whichever route that you take, please have fun and I hope that you enjoy your trip as much as I did.
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