Little Mount Sicker Railway was a Giant Engineering Achievement

One of the nuisances of driving is having to keep your eyes on the road, a real problem for me sometimes.

A case in point happened last week when, driving south from Chemainus, I cleared the intersection at the Island Highway and Mount Sicker Road that I’ll always know as the “Red Rooster.”

I always watch for and think of two things. At night I look up at the blackness that is Mount Sicker and marvel at the thought that, 100 and more years ago, an estimated 2000 people lived up there in the copper mining communities of Lenora and Tyee. Now, not so much as a candle light. All gone, gone, gone...

By day, immediately south of the intersection, I look to the right, just above eye level. Now it’s field, with what appears to be a gently-curved fence line skirted by broom bushes. But it’s not a fence. It’s one of the few surviving stretches of the Lenora & Mount Sicker Railway, the narrow gauge shortline that the ill-starred Henry Croft built to ship copper from his mine on Mount Sicker to the newly-established deep water port and smelter at Crofton.

Several adjoining properties on the high (west) side of the Highway share what looks like a driveway paralleling the Highway in their front yards. That’s more of the LMSRR before it crossed the Highway, E&N Railway tracks and farm fields to climb Mount Richards on its winding, roller coasting ride to salt water.

What caught my eye last week was dramatic. The property owner is building a new house or outbuilding and has bulldozed a new driveway, using the old railway grade. Unfortunately (I just had a quick glance) it appears that the historic grade has been dug down three or four feet.

Meaning, in effect, that it has been destroyed. God, how I hate ‘progress’ sometimes!

Which is precisely why I try to ‘save’ history is print and in photos if I can’t in fact. Sometimes we actually do save something significant—take the Kinsol Trestle, as good an example as you can get. But, alas, the Kinsols are few and far between and the sporadic battles to save history for posterity more often than not end dismally.

But enough of that: next week I tell you the story of the remarkable Lenora & Mount Sicker Railway. It was an engineering marvel in its day, and I’m pleased I’ve been able to hike much of it. The famous switchbacks on Mount Richards are still there, much as when the little railway was abandoned and its rails torn up for scrap. But, sadly, not much else.

On that happy note I leave you until next week!

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