The St. Clair Tunnel is the name for two separate rail tunnels which were built under the

St. Clair River The St. Clair River (french: Rivière Sainte-Claire) is a U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed November 7, 2011 river in central North America which flows from Lake Huron int ...

between

Sarnia Sarnia is a city in Lambton County, Ontario, Canada. It had a 2021 population of 72,047, and is the largest city on Lake Huron. Sarnia is located on the eastern bank of the junction between the Upper and Lower Great Lakes where Lake Huron f ...

Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central Ca ...

and

Port Huron, Michigan Port Huron is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the county seat of St. Clair County. The population was 30,184 at the 2010 census. The city is adjacent to Port Huron Township but is administered separately. Located along the St. Clair ...

. The original, opened in 1891 and used until it was replaced by a new larger tunnel in 1995, was the first full-size subaqueous tunnel built in North America. (By full-size it is meant that it allowed a railroad to run through it.) It is a

National Historic Landmark A National Historic Landmark (NHL) is a building, district, object, site, or structure that is officially recognized by the United States government for its outstanding historical significance. Only some 2,500 (~3%) of over 90,000 places liste ...

of the United States, and has been designated a civil engineering landmark by both US and Canadian engineering bodies.

First tunnel (1891–1995)

The first underwater rail tunnel in North America was opened by the St. Clair Tunnel Company in 1891. The company was a subsidiary of the

Grand Trunk Railway The Grand Trunk Railway (; french: Grand Tronc) was a railway system that operated in the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario and in the American states of Connecticut, Maine, Michigan, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. The rail ...

(GTR), which used the new route to connect with its subsidiary Chicago and Grand Trunk Railway, predecessor to the

Grand Trunk Western Railroad The Grand Trunk Western Railroad Company is an American subsidiary of the Canadian National Railway operating in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Since a corporate restructuring in 1971, the railroad has been under CN's subsidiary holding ...

(GTW). Before the tunnel's construction, Grand Trunk was forced to use time-consuming rail ferries to transfer cargo. The tunnel was an engineering marvel in its day and designed by

Joseph Hobson Joseph Hobson (1834–1917) was a Canadian land surveyor and railway design engineer. Early in his career he apprenticed under various professionals and became a provincial land surveyor when he was 21 years old. He did layout work for to ...

. The development of original techniques were achieved for excavating in a

compressed air Compressed air is air kept under a pressure that is greater than atmospheric pressure. Compressed air is an important medium for transfer of energy in industrial processes, and is used for power tools such as air hammers, drills, wrenches, an ...

environment. The Beach tunnelling shield, designed by

Alfred Ely Beach Alfred Ely Beach (September 1, 1826 – January 1, 1896) was an American inventor, publisher, and patent lawyer, born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He is most known for his design of New York City's earliest subway predecessor, the Beach Pneu ...

, was used to assist workmen in removing material from the route of the tunnel and left a continuous iron tube nearly long. Freight trains used the tunnel initially with the first passenger trains using it in 1892. The tunnel measured from portal to portal. The actual width of the St. Clair River at this crossing is only . The tube had a diameter of and hosted a single

standard gauge A standard-gauge railway is a railway with a track gauge of . The standard gauge is also called Stephenson gauge (after George Stephenson), International gauge, UIC gauge, uniform gauge, normal gauge and European gauge in Europe, and SGR in E ...

track. It was built at a cost of $2.7 million.

Locomotives

Steam locomotive A steam locomotive is a locomotive that provides the force to move itself and other vehicles by means of the expansion of steam. It is fuelled by burning combustible material (usually coal, oil or, rarely, wood) to heat water in the loco ...

s were used in the early years to pull trains through the tunnel, however concerns about the potential dangers of suffocation should a train stall in the tunnel led to the installation of

catenary In physics and geometry, a catenary (, ) is the curve that an idealized hanging chain or cable assumes under its own weight when supported only at its ends in a uniform gravitational field. The catenary curve has a U-like shape, superfici ...

wires for electric-powered locomotives by 1907. The first use of

electric locomotive An electric locomotive is a locomotive powered by electricity from overhead lines, a third rail or on-board energy storage such as a battery or a supercapacitor. Locomotives with on-board fuelled prime movers, such as diesel engines or g ...

s through the tunnel in regular service occurred on May 17, 1908. The locomotives were built by Baldwin-Westinghouse. A total of six electric locomotives were supplied by 1909. Each were equipped with three 240 horse power single phase motors and weighed 65 tons. They had a rigid wheel base and operated on a 3,300 volts, 25 cycle, single phase current. They had a maximum draw bar pull of 40,000 pounds, and a running draw bar pull of 25,000 pounds at 10 mph. According to a 1909 publication, it was standard practice to use two units together to pull a 1,000 ton train up the 2% grade. The entire length of the electric line was 4 miles and the trains were able to have a running speed of 20 to 30 mph. The Grand Trunk Railway used the locomotives to transfer both passenger and freight trains through the tunnel. In 1923, the GTR was

nationalized Nationalization (nationalisation in British English) is the process of transforming privately-owned assets into public assets by bringing them under the public ownership of a national government or state. Nationalization usually refers to p ...

by Canada's federal government, which then merged the bankrupt railway into the recently formed

Canadian National Railway The Canadian National Railway Company (french: Compagnie des chemins de fer nationaux du Canada) is a Canadian Class I freight railway headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, which serves Canada and the Midwestern and Southern United States. CN i ...

. CN also assumed control of Grand Trunk Western as a subsidiary and the tunnel company and continued operations much as before. The electric-powered locomotives were retired in 1958 and scrapped in 1959 after CN retired and scrapped its last steam-powered locomotives on trains passing through the tunnel. New diesel-powered locomotives did not cause the same problems with

air quality Air pollution is the contamination of air due to the presence of substances in the atmosphere that are harmful to the health of humans and other living beings, or cause damage to the climate or to materials. There are many different types ...

in this relatively short tunnel.

Freight cars

After the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...

, railways in North America started to see the

dimensions In physics and mathematics, the dimension of a mathematical space (or object) is informally defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within it. Thus, a line has a dimension of one (1D) because only one coordin ...

of freight cars increase. Canadian National (identified as CN after 1960) was forced to rely upon rail ferries to carry freight cars, such as hicube boxcars, automobile carriers, certain intermodal cars and chemical tankers, which exceeded the limits of the tunnel's dimensions.

Recognition

The tunnel was designated a Civil Engineering Landmark by both the

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

and the American Societies of Civil Engineers in 1991. The tunnel was declared a U.S.

in 1993. (includes diagrams) and The construction of the tunnel has also been recognized as National Historic Event by

Parks Canada Parks Canada (PC; french: Parcs Canada),Parks Canada is the applied title under the Federal Identity Program; the legal title is Parks Canada Agency (). is the agency of the Government of Canada which manages the country's 48 National Parks, th ...

since 1992, with a plaque at the site.

Second tunnel (1995–present)

The second tunnel was built to handle intermodal rail cars with double-stacked

shipping container A shipping container is a container with strength suitable to withstand shipment, storage, and handling. Shipping containers range from large reusable steel boxes used for intermodal shipments to the ubiquitous corrugated boxes. In the context of ...

s, which could not fit through the original tunnel or the

Michigan Central Railway Tunnel The Michigan Central Railway Tunnel is a railroad tunnel under the Detroit River connecting Detroit, Michigan, in the United States with Windsor, Ontario, in Canada. The U.S. entrance is south of Porter and Vermont streets near Rosa Parks Bouleva ...

in Detroit. By the early 1990s, CN had commissioned engineering studies for a replacement tunnel to be built adjacent to the existing St. Clair River tunnel. In 1992, new CN president

Paul Tellier Paul Mathias Tellier, (born 1939) is a Canadian businessman and former public servant and lawyer. Biography Born in Joliette, Quebec, Tellier earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Ottawa and his law degree from the University ...

foresaw that CN would increase its traffic in the

Toronto Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the anch ...

–

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = List of sovereign states, Count ...

corridor. The Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement was implemented in 1989 and discussions for a

North American Free Trade Agreement The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA ; es, Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte, TLCAN; french: Accord de libre-échange nord-américain, ALÉNA) was an agreement signed by Canada, Mexico, and the United States that crea ...

between Canada, the United States and Mexico discussions were underway at that time (NAFTA was implemented in 1994). It was only logical that import/export traffic on CN's corridor would increase dramatically. In 1993, CN began construction of the newer and larger tunnel. Tellier declared at the ceremonies:

''" hetunnel will give CN the efficiencies it needs to become a strong competitive force in North American transportation"''

Unlike the first tunnel, which was hand dug from both ends, an earth boring machine called the ''Excalibore'' made by the Lovat Tunnel Equipment Inc. was used. It started on the Canadian side and dug its way to the U.S. The tunnel opened later in 1994 whereupon freight and passenger trains stopped using the adjacent original tunnel, whose bore was sealed. The new tunnel was dedicated on May 5, 1995, and measures from portal to portal with a bore diameter of with a single standard gauge track. It could accommodate all freight cars currently in service in North America, thus the rail ferries were also retired in 1994 at the time of the tunnel's completion and opening for service. On November 30, 2004, CN announced that the new St. Clair River tunnel would be named the Paul M. Tellier Tunnel in honour of the company's retired president,

, who foresaw the impact the tunnel would have on CN's eastern freight corridor. A sign now hangs over each tunnel portal with this name.

Proposed projects

*Tunnel doubling in order to track doubling completion from South Bend via Port Huron and Sarnia to London. the new tunnel would be at the north of the current tunnel or the south of the current tunnel; the latter option would need the old tunnel to be filled with cement concrete. *Electrification at 25kV AC catenaries for CN Flint Line (South Bend - St. Clair Tunnel - London), NS Chicago Line and BNSF Northern Transcon.

Incident

On June 28, 2019, train CN M38331 28, hauling 100+ cars, had 40 cars derail in the tunnel, spilling 13,700 gallons of

sulfuric acid Sulfuric acid (American spelling and the preferred IUPAC name) or sulphuric acid ( Commonwealth spelling), known in antiquity as oil of vitriol, is a mineral acid composed of the elements sulfur, oxygen and hydrogen, with the molecular fo ...

and closing the tunnel for several days afterwards. The tunnel re-opened on July 10, 2019.Train tunnel between Michigan and Canada reopens after derailment spilled sulfuric acid
MLive.com, July 10, 2019

References

Sources

* *

External links

Historic American Engineering Record Heritage Documentation Programs (HDP) is a division of the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) responsible for administering the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), and Historic American Landscapes ...

(HAER) documentation: ** ** **
1890-07-26: THE SIMS - EDISON ELECTRIC TORPEDO - THE TORPEDO AT FULL SPEED - SECTIONAL VIEW OF THE TORPEDO
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