Because China and Canada used the same standard “1435” rail gauge—1,435mm (or four feet, eight and a half inches)—their rolling stock was mostly compatible. (Their car couplings and brake hose fittings were different, but they had brought plenty of adapters.) Within the first week of the Chinese invasion, Chinese rail speeder trucks were seen operating. A few weeks later, there were Chinese-built switch engines and flatcars in operation that came in through the Port of Vancouver, which was accessible by railcar ferry ships. The PLA commandeered all of the railroad rolling stock that was within their reach.
The hundreds of miles of rail lines that connected Jasper to Prince Rupert and Jasper to Vancouver were repeatedly severed by the resistance. Both the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and Canadian National (CN) rail lines were broken, often for days or weeks at a time. Harassing fire on the crew responding to the first break changed everything. They insisted on having security posted before they would go out for another repair. This added several days to all subsequent repairs, since PLA forces had to be sent out in advance to set up a security perimeter.
Most of the rail breaks were made on curved sections of tracks, over trestles, and on grades to make repairs more difficult. Explosives and thermite were used sparingly in destroying tracks. The resistance found that “borrowed” Cat D8 or Komatsu D155 bulldozer could do the same work, leaving their initially small supply of donated, improvised, and stolen explosives and incendiaries for more important uses—primarily for targets that were under active guard.
The resistance also had hopes of derailing trains, but modern rail-signaling technology often prevented this. Electrical continuity checks detected breaks in the rail miles in advance of approaching trains. The resistance cells learned to overcome this technology in two different ways. First, if they blew up tracks immediately in front of a train on a curve, there was no way that a train could come to an immediate stop. (Stopping distances for laden trains at full speed were measured in miles, not feet.) Second, they learned to use heavy-gauge electric cable to “splice” circuit continuity, so that if a section of rail was loosened, it would still show a complete circuit.
Inevitably, the industrious Chinese began repairing the rails nearly as quickly as the scattered resistance cells could break them. The war against the rails had reached a stalemate. While the resistance succeeded in degrading the efficient use of the railroads, they could not quite deny them to the Chinese.
Alan McGregor, who was an avid reader of U.S. Civil War and American frontier books, came up with an invention that would almost permanently deprive the Chinese use of one long stretch of railroad from Prince George to the outskirts of Vanderhoof. His brilliant idea, “The Claw,” was based on accounts that he had read of the Union army’s destruction of Confederate railroad lines.
They chose the section of track that meandered west from Prince George through the mountains because it was a single track. With no redundancy in this segment, destroying just one track would completely deny the PLA the use of that route.
Guyot Railway and Engine Maintenance, Ltd., was a family-run business that had been in operation since 1939. They mainly did railway maintenance, but they were also set up for engine and railcar repairs. Their long rectangular shop had two sets of rails running straight through it.
The centerpiece of the shop in Prince George was a 180-ton-capacity overhead rail-mounted crane that straddled the inside of the building. Most frequently it was used for lifting railcars off their four-wheel and six-wheel bogies (also called trucks) so that the undercarriages could be repaired or replaced. Up until the Crunch, the big crane had been used to lift entire engine and motor units out of diesel-electric locomotives. After the Crunch, however, with currency fluctuations, erratic train scheduling changes, and uncertain payments from CN Rail, the Guyot company had laid off most of its work crew. Under their new contract with the Chinese, they didn’t do much more than track repairs, minor engine repairs, lower-level (but still heavy) railcar repairs, and putting on four-hundred-pound car adapters.
Unlike most European nations, which had long since converted to the use of concrete railroad ties, Canada’s western railroads still used wooden ties quite extensively. In Canada there were typically three thousand wooden ties per mile of track. Alan preferred to use the British Empire term sleepers instead of ties.
Even without the weight box, the Claw weighed nearly two tons. It had originally been a piece of open-pit mining equipment called an Alternate Drag—a cable-dragged rock ripper used by a coal mine operator for the times when their excavations hit a layer of hard shale. Its cross section was much like that of a traditional farming plow, but scaled up by a factor of four. The blade was twelve feet long, six feet tall, thirty-eight inches wide at the rear, and just two inches wide at the front.
The Claw’s plow blade was expertly recontoured into an axelike blade and a notch to tailor it for cutting railroad ties at a precise depth below the wheels. The new tie-cutting notch was reinforced with dozens of successive rows of TIG welds. Honing the Claw’s notch and point took nearly seven hours and burned up fourteen abrasive cut-off wheels in the process. This was followed by flame hardening, quenching it with water from a hose, and then annealing it with a second application of heat from a torch.
The Claw was attached to a double set of six-wheel trucks that had been salvaged from both ends of a scrapped intermodal well car. Atop this was a massive framework holding the Claw, and above that was welded a deep C-shaped metal box, which held twenty-seven tons of assorted scrap steel that had been laboriously hauled from the Guyot shop scrap pile. This enormous weight was designed to keep the wheels from jumping off the tracks once the Claw dug in. Their hope was that despite the tremendous vertical and lateral forces generated by the Claw, the great weight of the twelve-wheeled apparatus would keep the wheels on the tracks.
The Claw could be raised only by a pair of hydraulic pistons that had originally been mounted on a Case IH LRZ 150 front-end loader tractor. The pistons were simplistically set up for “one-time use”—meaning that they could be raised only using an off-board hydraulic pump at the railway shop.
They backed a coupled trio of SD70M-2 engines into the shop. These engines still had mostly Canadian crews but per PLA orders there was always at least one armed guard on each train that was “in motion.” (The guards usually came in pairs.) Once the engines were turned over to the shop for repairs, they were “out of sight, out of mind,” and left unguarded.
Like the rest of CN’s rolling stock, these three engines had been commandeered by the Chinese in the first few weeks of the invasion and crudely repainted in PLA colors (black with red trim) with a PLA logo on the front, the ubiquitous “Eight One” (in hanzi logogram characters).
The three train engines had all come into the Guyot shop over the course of the four preceding days on various repair pretenses that had been faked by resistance operatives. (The PLA rail transport coordinator had been lulled into the habit of taking all repair paperwork at face value.) One of the three work orders read: “Replace Broken Turbo-Entabulator.”
The three engines were the SD70M-2 model, a powerful DC traction engine that had been built from 2005 up until the Crunch and widely used. Canadian National had 190 of them. They were all equipped with the 16-710G3C-T2 prime mover, which was rated at 3,200 kilowatts, which equated to 4,300 horsepower, generating 113,100 pound-feet of continuous tractive effort, and 163,000 pound-feet of starting effort.