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By Nick Nielsen

Railway expansion

Calls for expansion of short-line railways in Saskatchewan

Jun 13, 2025 | 3:30 PM

In Saskatchewan, there are 13 short line railways that make up a total of 2075 km of track that carries goods through or near over 70 communities in the province.

In a statement issued by the Saskatchewan NDP Leader Carla Beck, who is also the Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Rural Affairs, she’s calling on the Sask Party Government to start offering better supports for short-line railway services.

“Short-line railways play a vital role in moving agricultural products in our province,” said Beck. “Focusing on the future means investing in trade-enabling infrastructure like short-line rail. We need to support investments in our short-line rail system to ensure it’s running at full capacity.”

The Carlton Trail Railway is one of the longest in Saskatchewan, running from the pulp mill north of Prince Albert, down south to Warman where it connects to one of the main CN Railway lines that runs across the province, along with a small spur railway that runs from Prince Albert to the southeast where it connects with another short-line rail in Birch Hills, Northern Lights Rail, for a total of 184 km of track.

Bonni Campbell is the General Manager for Carlton Trail Railway, and she said that there was just a conference between the short-line rails in the province last week. There, they all shared common concerns.

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“We share about $1,000,000 annually in funding from the province, which is great, at least they’re helping us out. I think the biggest thing that came out of that was that we basically need double that, and even if we were to get that, it still only basically helps to fix about a mile of track. I’m currently running on 114 miles of track, so you can just imagine what we have to spend every year on our infrastructure to keep it up and running and things like that.”

One particular area of concern is expansion. While provincial funding for the short-line rails does help to cover the cost of the upkeep, none of those lines reach up north to mining communities like La Ronge, and the entire north west corner of the province doesn’t have a single railway north of Highway 16 or west of Highway 11, leaving a bunch of farming communities to ship their grain over highways.

Each railway car takes the place of about 2.5 semi trucks on the road, and last year, Carlton Trail saw 1800 loaded railcars from their railway take cargo, mostly grain from Viterra, from Prince Albert down to Warman. That works out to about 4500 semis off the road per year, but Campbell believes it could be much more if they could expand further and start to carry products from northern mines to market with railcars heading south, and send those same railcars back north with basic needs like groceries to help bring the cost of living down in the north.

“We don’t have anything up north. That’s a strategic area that I would definitely like to get into because I think we can with great benefit to them.” Campbell continued, “Everything gets trucked there, and they pay a lot of money for everything to be trucked up there. They pay a much higher cost of living due to that.”

At a media availability outside Richardson, near Regina, where the Stewart Southern Railway operates, Beck called on the province to increase grants provided to short-line railways, create a long-term strategy for building short-line rail capacity, and start to work with the federal government on expanding short-line railways.

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nick.nielsen@pattisonmedia.com