22 Replies to “Another One Bites The Dust”

  1. Why? Just old? No farming in that area anymore? I hate seeing them come down.

  2. Reason? Unions.
    Rail which should be really cheap has been made more expensive and complicated by unions.
    The rail companies don’t want to deal with less than full unit trains, and these older facilities just are not big enough and fast enough to fill those unit trains.
    Used to be an elevator did fine with a 12 car spot.
    I work for a company that fills a few cars here and there, very unreliable service to say the least. I even had an CP employee inquire as to how much traffic was on one of my sidings, and then proceeded to keep me in copy of his e-mails to other CP employees in his attempt to rip up my siding. I’m not sure if the culture and directive at CP is improving, but I also got to seem him get in trouble from another department over his desire to rip up my siding.

  5. A very temporary prairie landscape lasting about 130 to 150 years
    Dictated by rail stops every township or so , one days wagon ride
    Nostalgic but not necessary.
    About as required as the Canajun wheat board or Fatric duffy’s senate

  6. Thank you Paul!
    It’s sad. really ! Can you elaborate? Just trying to wrap my head around this and how it works. Siding? How is the union ruining this ? I love driving from the west coast to Manitoba and its just so awesome to see these old grain elevators rockin with people working in them still although not many i do see them. I love the reminders of yester year its pretty cool im 36 so i remember vaguely seeing these near deloraine manitoba my grandpa used to go there all po’d talking about grain prices ect ect. Never owned a piece of equipment newer than 72.
    Anyway just want a better understanding of whats going on.

  7. This is about the 4001st prairie sentinel to bite the dust, so to speak, in the most inglorious manner, in the last twenty-five years or so.
    If they have to go, and they do, why not let them go out in a blaze of glory? Make it a celebration of life, a noble life well lived.
    Set the edifice aflame, make it a community wake, hand out wieners and marshmallows, and honour it as befitting any of our pioneers. Utilize the occasion for local volunteer fire departments to study and learn and hone their skills.
    Burn it down you say? Oh! what about the environmental consequences?
    Taking into account the demolition expenses (I’m talkin’ big dollars) and waste removal (crap that has yet to be really dealt with), vs a shot of combustion CO2,- (oh, I forgot, trackhoes, dumptrucks, cats have no footprint). It’s just a bullshit. The carbon footprint of this blaze would not amount to Al Gore’s farts after a night of debauchery!

  11. Come on people, politics did not play all that important a role in taking that elevator down, a plant that appears to be not all old. (I guess about 1985)
    In the 70’s and early 80’s, I hauled grain to an elevator 7 miles from one farm , 6 from the other. I had two trucks, 260 bushels on one truck, 220 on the other. Each elevator loaded about 25 rail cars per day. When they closed the local elevators, we received trucking assistance from the grain companies, we then hauled 1000 bushels with one semi, 25 miles away. They were loading over 100 cars per day at the new elevator.
    Today, the guys that bought my farm are hauling with 3 semi trailer units, 50 miles away.
    We build 600+ HP tractors, air drills that seed 300 acres a day, combines that pick up 250 acres a day, and we wonder, ”where did the small towns go??” They just don’t need them anymore. It’s called mechanization.
    My Grandfather was born in Europe, his dad farmed 20 acres, Granddad farmed 480 acres, I farmed 2500 acres, the guys that bought my farm seed over 10,000 acres. It’s called evolution. Sad, but a reality.

  12. Thanks joe. Just wanted some insight. everyone has an opinion. i appreaciate all of them.

  13. .
    UGG was shutting down an older elevator in Manitoba and all the farmers got together for a meeting to demand they keep it open.
    The Company representative disarmed those farmers in three minutes by saying …. it is a 1953 elevator , and when I surveyed the parking lot I did not see one single farmer drive up in a 1953 pickup truck and I demand to know why.
    Reminds me of the huge Auto-Workers conference in Detroit circa 1983 , they demanded the government put heavy tariff taxes on all import Japanese cars because the USA auto industry was suffering.
    A bored reporter stepped outside for a cigarette and ended up counting the cars in the parking lot , 80% of the protesters were driving Japanese imports

  14. There is a hell of a lot of good lumber in those old elevators. Two by sixes and two by eights, rough cut and laid like bricks and spiked down. Why not take it down piecemeal and salvage the lumber? Fill it to within a yard of the top with grain, then take the roof off with the aid of a crane. Put a floating floor on top of the grain, and get a crew up there pulling spikes, or drilling around them with a small hole saw. Freed planks could be slid down a flexible plastic chute to the ground. As the walls are lowered, draw off a little grain into a waiting rail car, to lower the floating floor, and resume stripping planks. I’m guessing a six-man crew would take about a week to do it. Run the planks through a thickness planer to trim them down to current framing lumber size, and sell it. A few holes shouldn’t matter for most framing use, but if you were fussy, you could plug the holes with pieces of glued-in dowel stock before putting it through the planer.

  15. You ever see an elevator explosion? all it takes is a homeless or illegal smoking a cigarette or a druggie freebasing. The older the elevator, the worse it gets. I understand that wooden elevators are by far the worse. CAL2 has the bygone reason for these small country elevators. Notice, we don’t have milk stops along the rail lines to pick up those nice shiny cans. Got a lot of sour milk that way. I used to ride with my grand uncle in his wagon to the milk stop. Times change. We use trucks now. Next time you travel, see if you can fly in an Ford Trimotor, or JU52, or DC3.

  16. I flew in a 1938 Douglas Skyliner in South America on a regular run, way more leg room and the chair was the size of a first class chair.

  17. Regardless of the reasons for demolishing them it is indeed sad to see the silent sentinels of the prairies disappear.

  18. @gordinkneehill – “There is a hell of a lot of good lumber in those old elevators”
    And most, if not all was old-growth fir – virtually impossible to find nowadays and very expensive when you do. A terrible waste.

  19. NeoLuddite & gordinkneehill;
    Two elevators in my old neighbourhood have gone down in the past 5 years. Not the size of this one in the video but big enough in my day. The first to go was bid out for salvage with the wood being the big carrot. Once the crew got into tearing the internal bins apart they found that during construction the walls were layered 2×4’s with spikes every 4 to 5″. Near impossible to pull out as well. To complete the contract they had to cut up the building as best they could and haul it away. When the 2nd elevator next door came up for tear down the local fire department was called. Pretty much the whole town (Creston, B.C.) showed up as they torched it!
    Not to be outdown we still have two elevators (same as the video in size) that will have to go down in the next few years. Safety is becoming more of an issue. No one wants to see them go but they are abandoned and deteriorating.

  20. Some of the elevators of more recent construction and better condition have been sold to local farmers and are being used for storing their own grain.

  21. Having lived in Alberta at the turn of the century (yeah, sounds ancient) Myself and some other diehard photographers made an attempt at capturing as many elevators as we could before they came down. I have chronicled over 100 different elevators myself.
    The major reason that they came down and not remain up and idle was for insurance liability. A few were sold and either relocated to private property or made into a museum. Being salvaged for wood was no good partially due to the old wood being somewhat petrified as well as being fastened together to last a hundred years or so.
    The Canadian government is pretty much doing the same thing with lighthouses. Who needs a light when you got a satellite, besides us old farts that still use traditional methods of navigation. A compass and a chart need no batteries or satellite coverage.
    btw, it is a known fact that aviators have also used elevators for navigation on the prairies although a few rookie student pilots from eastern Canada never understood why there were so many POOL, Saskatchewans.

  22. two things caught my eye. the incredible amount of dust that came from the elevator and the curve of the horizon in the video.

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