On the morning of November 21, 1950, the men on the troop train must have been looking forward to reaching their destination. 340 soldiers had embarked from Shilo, Manitoba on their way to Fort Lewis, Washington State, where plans held that they would be trained and eventually shipped across the Pacific to fight in the Korean War. The men, all members of the second regiment of the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, would not arrive in Fort Lewis that day, and 17 of their number would never make the trip.

At 10:35, a few kilometres south of Valemount, the westbound troop train collided head on with a passenger train outbound from Vancouver on its way to Montreal. 

The trains had been moving at the maximum speed allowed, 30 miles per hour. The locomotives and front cars of both trains were transformed into twisted hulks of metal thrown chaotically off of the railroad track, according to some eyewitness accounts recorded in newspapers of the day. A soldier riding in one of the rear carriages of the troop train recalled that he felt the train come to a lurching stop and when he looked out the window he could see nothing but snow. He and others in his carriage were only alerted to the reason for the train stopping when they heard the shouts of their comrades closer to the front of the train.

John Stables, a soldier from Edmonton, remembered that as he was playing crib with three other soldiers, they were thrown forward, breaking the table.  

“I opened the coach door on the down-side and on looking towards the front of the train, saw all of the coaches in front of us were off the track,” he said.

In the final reckoning, 21 men died, most from the troop train. 17 soldiers were on the casualty list as well as four Canadian National Railway operators. Harvey Church, a Jasperite and Hank Prosinuk, recently transferred from Jasper from Edmonton, were manning the locomotive on the westbound train. Jack Stinson and Adam Oleschuck, both from Jasper, were aboard the continental passenger train.

A total of 42 others were injured, 33 of which were considered “walking wounded.”

The wreck happened the morning after the most significant snowstorm to that point of the winter and outside temperatures hovered around -15 degrees Fahrenheit as rescuers attempted to free the injured and recover bodies, the Edmonton Bulletin reported.     

The process of identifying the dead was made incredibly difficult in no small part because some of the fatal injuries were caused by pressurized steam escaping the wrecked locomotives. Other victims were burned almost beyond recognition by an oil fire that tore through some of the wooden carriages.

The body of one Jasper man killed in the disaster, engineer Harvey Church, was not even recovered until the following April. Church had evidently been thrown from the locomotive and was found some six metres from the track after the snow had melted somewhat.

Jasper played a significant role in the immediate response to the disaster. Two local doctors and several nurses boarded a hospital train that was sent to the scene of the accident and many town residents turned out to greet the victims as they stopped in Jasper en route to medical treatment in Edmonton. Local businesses donated chocolate bars and cigarettes for the survivors.

As devastating and disastrous as the collision was, but for a matter of minutes it could have been many times worse. The westbound train had just crossed a bridge that spanned a 500-foot canyon a very short distance from the site of the eventual wreck.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, it became clear that it was a very small omission that caused the accident to happen. A board of inquiry set up by the Ministry of Transport heard testimony from Albert John Atherton, a then 22-year-old signal operator stationed at Red Pass Junction (just east of Mount Robson). Atherton told the board he had not paid attention to a repeated train order from a dispatcher in Blue River, confident that he had heard the details correctly the first time. As a result of this testimony, Atherton was charged with manslaughter and criminal negligence for causing the deaths of the four CN employees. 

Atherton’s father, a constituent of Conservative MP John Diefenbaker in Saskatchewan, visited the future Prime Minister’s wife and convinced her to encourage Diefenbaker to defend his son.

Diefenbaker did just that, securing an acquittal on both counts for Atherton thanks in no small part to a dramatic performance in the court room. Claiming that the rule book governing the conduct of railway signal operators and dispatchers was “so full of holes that you could drive a team of horses through it,” Diefenbaker at one point opened a window in the Prince George court room and tossed the book outside. Blame for the accident should have been shared by Atherton’s superiors, he argued. 

“They were able to exculpate themselves by passing blame down the line,” he later wrote in his autobiography, One Canada. “Atherton had only one passport, and that was marked,’Prison’. I considered it unjust.”

Another key element to Diefenbaker’s defence revolved around the concept that transmission wires could be momentarily disrupted in certain situations. 

The Blue River dispatcher claimed to have sent a train order for Atherton to pass on to the troop train that instructed to wait “ AT CEDARSIDE” a siding some eight kilometres north of the eventual crash site, where it would pull off the main line to allow the passenger train to continue. The message received by the troop train lacked these two key words, leading the crew to assume that they would need to stop at Gosnell siding, further south, to allow both the #2 and #4 passenger trains to pass. Diefenbaker argued that with a heavy snowfall in the area, it was possible that something other than human error had caused the inaccurate relay of the order.

Fifty five years after the fact, all that’s left to commemorate that awful November day are a series of plaques and cairns. There is one at CFB Shilo, one in Valemount and another along the railroad tracks at actual site of the wreck. And now, thanks to the donation made to the Jasper cenotaph by Dong Han and the local Korean community, there will be another place where people can pause to remember those who were involved in the Canoe River rail disaster.