Riding the rails to Port Severn
16 September 2018 | Port Severn, Lock 45; the last one!
We departed Orillia this morning on a beautiful clear, windless day. Wow! Don't see that often. Cruising over Lake Couchiching and heading up the canals we encountered heavy boat traffic. Turns out There was a pro bass derby, and everyone has high powered fishing machines, to get out to the fishing grounds fast.
Since it was such a nice weekend, there were more cottage people out enjoying themselves than we have seen the whole trip. Last kick of the summer etc!
We decended through two locks at 40 feet each and then arrived at Big Chute. When they were building the canals, the came to one section of solid granite, that was going to be enormously expensive to build a lock over. Some ingenious engineer decided to build a railway car that picks up the boats, and transports them to Georgian Bay. Pretty slick! There is some talk of the Americans doing this in Chicago. The Asian carp are getting through the electric fence to the Great Lakes. They want to build a wall across the river and transport boats over the wall.
Susan loves Big Chute because she gets to be a passenger. I drive our boat on to the slings, the Park staff hydraulicly tighten them, and away we go for a rail car ride!
My buddy, Bill Murphy has pictures of he and his dad on the rail car in the 1960s. Then, the cars were quite a bit smaller, and manually cinched. In 1977 a new, larger car was built, to accommodate the larger boats transversing the locks
The picture today is of us on the rail car.