Lenora Mount Sicker Line

The Lenora Mount Sicker Line is an 11.6 mile railway line of the British Columbia Railway (BC Rail) on Vancouver Island running from Lenora to the Crofton Smelter via Westholme on the Esquimalt & Nanaimo Line. It is Line 101 of the Island Region of BC Rail.

History
The Lenora Mount Sicker Railway (LMS) opened its line in 1898 to haul ore from Lenora, to the west of Big Sicker Mountain, to the Vancouver Copper Company smelter just south of the town of Crofton, running via Westholme, where a connection was made to the Esquimalt & Nanaimo Railway. The smelter was taken over by the Britannia Mining & Smelting Company in 1908; in 1963 it was taken over by Cominco, when that company absorbed Britannia Mining & Smelting.

Meanwhile, the E&N had built a 3-mile branch from Westholme to Crofton, opening it in 1900. When the E&N acquired the LMS in 1914, the western portion of the line, from Westholme to Lenora, was retained, but as the output of the mine complex grew, the eastern section - 5.3 miles from Westholme to the Crofton smelter - with its complicated set of three switchbacks to the west of Crofton Lake, was abandoned, proving incapable of handling the ever-increasing traffic. To remedy this, the LMS trackage at the smelter was connected to the E&N's Crofton branch via a short stretch of new trackage.

In 1957, British Columbia Forest Products opened a paper mill at Crofton.

Lenora Mount Sicker Railway locomotives
The Lenora Mount Sicker Railway operated a total of four Shay-type locomotives.

Services
The entire line is freight-only. Ore traffic from Lenora is relatively light, but the section between Westholme and Crofton is busy with ore and freight movements to Crofton. Until 1914, there were passenger trains between Lenora and Westholme and between Crofton and Westholme, timed to meet the E&N trains.