Confessions of a Train Geek

Some of you may remember the proposed Acadian Railway, to run across the Acadian Peninsula in New Brunswick following a similar route to the old CN Caraquet subdivision. There was a flurry of news articles in 2007 but not much has happened in the past few years.

A new industry for Caraquet, announced this month, may change that. Peter Swire, promoter of the Acadian Railway, is also the president of the GreenSafe Demanufacturing plant. CBC is reporting that construction should start by the end of November 2009 and the plant should be up and running by the end of 2010. The plant will take old appliances and recover all of the components, including the refrigerant.

The tie-in to the proposed Acadian Railway is that the plant is anticipated to receive at least 40 truckloads of appliances per day. The alternative to this is to construct a railway to bring those items in, and presumably ship the recovered components out.

Peter sent me a copy of the press release last week. I should point out that CBC got the funding amount wrong by a factor of 1,000... the private investor has put $50 million into the project, not $50,000. Press release (PDF).

EDIT: Peter pointed out that the plant is to be built in Caraquet, not Tracadie as I originally posted. Thanks for the correction.

Labels: acadian