Late one night, large chunks of ice pressed against each other near the mouth of Iowa's Turkey River near Millville, forming a dam and causing the river to rise by six feet in mere minutes. Five spans of the bridge on CP's Marquette Subdivision main line across the river lifted as a result and toppled into the icy water, leaving a 400-foot gap. Just 12 days later, with all safety inspections completed, CP Train 691, an empty potash train bound for Saskatchewan, eased across nine newly installed spans over the Turkey River.
What happened during those 12 days was an astonishing engineering achievement, and a testament to CP's fortitude, resiliency and diversity. The Operations team quickly rerouted freight traffic through Wisconsin, while the Engineering team formulated the replacement plan that would restore the line to operation as quickly as possible. They needed 34,000 tons of material to construct a causeway that would serve as a platform for cranes adjacent to the missing track, and this alone required a crew of more than 300 employees from Pattison Sand Company to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week to produce, load and transport that material. CP had approximately 85 employees and contractors working day and night to repair and install a track that was then immediately elevated two additional feet to protect it from future flooding.
“This was a unique situation that required our whole team to work collaboratively in a constantly changing environment. In a situation as dynamic as this was, our team met and overcame every challenge in order to pull off an extraordinary project.”
Read more in Asset and Rail Network Resiliency.
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