BACK ON TRACK
By BERNARD TOBIN
Phil Anwender is looking forward to building a fence this fall - a fence he
hopes will keep hunters and hikers off his property and away from his
240-sow hog operation.Anwender won't be the only farmer hammering fence staples. He'll be joined by 33 landowners, including seven farmers, who have managed to purchase part of an abandoned CN railway which runs through Ellice township, north of Stratford.
The 14-kilometre stretch is a small piece of the rail line which runs north to Owen Sound, and only a fraction of the more than 12,000 kilometres of orphaned rail in Ontario.
From Harrow in Essex county, to Powassan in Northern Ontario, to Hartington in Frontenac county, farmers across the province continue an intense struggle against conservation authorities and "rails-to-trails" groups wanting a slice of rural landscape for city dwellers and hikers to roam. But farmers may finally be getting the upper hand.
For the last year, the Ellice township landowners have been leading a race to purchase the rail bed and expect to cross the finish line later this month, ahead of a competing rails to trails group.
In Zorra township, Oxford county, 77 landowners, mostly farmers, are putting the final touches on a deal allowing them to buy 27 kilometres of an abandoned CP line that runs from Embro to St. Marys.
CN began tearing up the rails in Ellice township last August, a year after it had been abandoned. Anwender says he knew the railbed was going to be trouble when CN hired kids to gather the rail spikes into piles for collection at a later date.
"What these kids thought was their idea of a good time was to throw a bunch of these spikes into our corn field," he says.
At harvest, the spikes and the plates they were attached to would claim three new tires and about 12 hours of downtime for Anwender's custom combine operator.
Anwender, who farms a stone's throw from Stratford, hopes his fence will keep out the shotgun-toting hunters who walk along the railbed, no more than 150 feet from his house.
"There's times when we've been irrigating manure and you see a bunch of guys come right through your field with shotguns," Anwender says. "You're not expecting it or anticipating it, but that's what some of these guys do.
"They'll walk through our corn field and scare the deer out into an opening and there's couple of guys waiting to take the deer out.
"I know if I stood in the middle of town with a gun 100 feet away from someone's house, they'd have the SWAT team on me - it would be shoot first, ask questions later, but out here it seems to be something that's accepted."
Having heard of Anwender's woes, Dave Lindner, a cash crop and cow-calf farmer who lives further up the line, knew it was only a matter of time before bikers, hikers and hunters would start to journey further north.
When Lindner heard that CN wanted to sell the property last summer, he helped quickly organize the 33 landowners along the line who were willing to buy sections of the railbed that dissected or ran adjacent to their property. But CN didn't want to deal with more than 30 owners buying small parcels of land.
Lindner's group needed help and was grateful when the township offered to act on their behalf. Councillor George Wicke says the township was happy to help out the landowners. CN had originally asked the township to buy the property, but there was no money and it didn't want to take on the liability. At the time, CN was asking $750 an acre plus legal costs.
Lindner says his group "got a scare" last fall when a local rails-to-trails group entered the bidding for the railway.
The trails group wanted the township to buy the property, but council "made it clear they didn't want to own the property and be liable for it," Wicke says. Other than the landowners, "everybody else who was interested in it wanted the township to buy it and give it to them."
The rails group also approached several government departments, including tourism, touting the benefits of a trail, but "the Ontario government has no money for that anymore," Lindner says.
Fearing that the railbed could slip from their grasp, the landowners put in a bid to pay CN $250 per acre of railway land plus legal costs. They had a deal.
Wicke says the township plans to have the surveying complete, and the deal with CN closed by Sept. 15. It will then take a couple of months to transfer the property to the landowners.
Ontario Federation of Agriculture vice-president Ken Kelly says the Ellice township case shows what landowners can do when they act quickly.
"When the last train leaves town, that's when farmers should start talking whether in fact they want [railbeds], and getting together to make some decisions on how they're going to go about getting it," Kelly says.
Kelly, OFA's point man on the abandoned rights of way issue, says farmers are going to have to fend for themselves. "It's always been that way. The province has no money to help anyone, and that would include the trail proponents....That's going to level the playing fields substantially.
"The railways have so many miles of these railways, that anybody with cash in hand, they're going to be interested in talking to them," Kelly says.
It's been a long struggle, but it's been worthwhile, says Lindner, who plans to have the five acres of railbed he'll acquire back in production in a few years. But for now, he'll use some of the gravel from the bed for fill around his buildings, and try to control the weeds that have taken over the track.
Anwender will purchase both halves of the railway tracks because the owner opposite him doesn't want his share of the track, which runs five- eighths of a mile through Anwender's property.
He says he's going to put up a couple of large fences and he hopes they send a message. "We are treating it as private property.
"We're going to try to be good neighbours, but people are not welcome on our property."