Geography
The development of the Manitoulin and North Shore, or Algoma Eastern, was first and foremost guided by the presence and location of various natural resources along Lake Huron's North Shore, as well as the Sudbury Basin. American industrialist Francis Clergue had recently boosted the pulp and paper industry around Sault Ste. Marie, creating another market for the North Shore logging industry. The need for sulfuric acid in paper-making drove Clergue's interest in far eastern nickel-mining locations near Sudbury, which were quite distant from his Lake Superior Corporation's Sault Ste. Marie-based business empire. These far eastern properties, the Gertrude and Elsie mines, soon became important to the Lake Superior Corporation, and drove the demand for a rail link. Far from the original M&NS charter of a rail link connecting Manitoulin Island to the North Shore, Clergue's 1900 charter allowed for a Sudbury-to-Sault Ste. Marie rail connection, along with the original M&NS plan of a connection to Manitoulin.
When construction began in 1901, the builders, Fauquier Brothers, avoided cutting straight through the "ever-present" rock ridges of the western Sudbury area. Instead, sidehill construction was used, creating a meandering, indirect course. The muskeg and swamp areas of the right of way resulted in the need for a number of wooden trestles or use of gravel fill. The builders did make cuts through softer clay ridges, but used an absolute minimum of track ballast, inevitably causing the rails under the weight of trains to be submerged in mud during or after wet weather.
Around the same time, a then-unconnected section was constructed of what would ultimately be the Algoma Eastern line, from Stanley Junction (later McKerrow) south to what would become Espanola, through the hills north of the La Cloche Mountains and across the Spanish River. This spur was promptly leased to Canadian Pacific, as there was no way for Algoma Eastern to service it from its Sudbury yard without using Canadian Pacific's tracks.
Sluggishly, and after a number of financial and management setbacks with its parent company, the Lake Superior Corporation, the Manitoulin and North Shore Railway continued to push west from Sudbury throughout the late 1900s and early 1910s, maintaining its plans to build all the way to Sault Ste. Marie and to connect to its spur at Stanley Junction. From Turbine to Nairn, the M&NS line roughly paralleled the CPR line and ran on the south shore of the Spanish River, but was often no more than five or six feet above the river's summer level; in the opinion of rail historian Dale Wilson, "spring flood-waters must have been a chronic problem." At the same time, earlier sections of the line closer to Sudbury were improved with some draining of the muskeg lands and improvement of the line's infrastructure, which was not completely successful.
In April 1913, railway construction had carved its way through the La Cloche Mountains to Turner, which was across the North Channel from Little Current on Manitoulin Island, and which was the chosen location for dock facilities, as well as the railway's western yard. By October, the now-iconic Little Current Swing Bridge was open, allowing trains (and later, road vehicles) to cross the North Channel.
In the time after the construction of the railway, the area's environment would be slowly transformed. Hydroelectric power operations such as the INCO High Falls and Nairn Falls Dam and Generating Plant would help to slightly stabilize the seasonal flooding of the Spanish River through the creation of the Agnew Lake reservoir upstream. As well, the clay belts and muskeg west of Sudbury would always be challenging terrain, and as active and passive deforestation due to industrial operations at locations like O'Donnell devastated the environment in the area, it would become even more desolate, and less attractive to permanent human habitation. Today much of that area of the line, both active and disused, is relatively remote, and is still used for Vale Limited industrial operations.
