P’tit Train du Nord?

Sian Lathrop

On a particularly hot day this summer, a few friends and I decided to drive to a swim spot near Val-David. We pulled into a parking lot and began the 20 minute walk to the river. The trail we followed was called “P’tit Train du Nord,” and a large information poster on the side of the path informed us that we were walking on what had once been a railway. A friend filled me in, explaining that in the late 90s the largely abandoned track was converted into 234 km of biking trails.  

The decline of the “P’tit Train du Nord” began in the late 1950s, when autoroutes and highways were constructed to take Montrealers out of the city and to their summer homes in the Laurentides. As cars became more widely available, the train was rendered obsolete. It became the stuff of folk songs, and as singer-songwriter Félix Leclerc playfully points out in his 1972 chanson, “there was only one passenger, and it was the driver.” Leclerc’s humorous observation, however, is followed by a much darker conclusion: “The north train is like death, even when there is no one on board.”  

The little train was born in the late 19th century, as a project of Curé Antoine Labelle. Labelle, sometimes referred to as “The King of the North,” was a Catholic priest and fierce proponent of colonization in the latter half of the 19th century.  The little train was the outcome of Labelle’s campaigning as the Minister for Agriculture and Colonization in Quebec: he is credited with the settlement of nearly 5,000 non-Indigenous people on Anishinabeg territory. Labelle’s train tracks had disastrous consequences for the Anishnabe people of the region, causing large scale loss of territory and depletion of hunting and fishing ground. From 1891 to 1918, the construction of Laurentian railway infrastructures resulted in devastating forest fires and the intensification of logging practices in the region. The trains were also used to transport equipment needed to flood vast amounts of Indigenous territory. The hunting grounds of the Atikamekw Nehirowisiw of Opitciwan were destroyed, and many semi-nomadic people, like the people of Wemotaci, were forced onto much smaller reserve land then they had previously inhabited. 

This history is not on the information poster that I passed walking on the path that day, nor is it acknowledged on the website for the bike trail. Online, the “linear park” is marketed as a formerly abandoned industrial space reclaimed by the Quebec Government for outdoor recreation. Thus, the “Parc Linéaire Le P'tit Train du Nord” reveals the violence of Canadian settler-colonialism, and showcases its current insidious form. Using the language of sustainability and environmentalism, the trail buries its history of state-sanctioned violence. Cyclists are left to enjoy the ride, never having to confront the injustices that paved the way for 234 km of scenic biking trails.  

Text and image by Sian Lathrop