Since there was no suitable site for a loading pier on "the mines" side of the Island, the ore had to be carried to "the front" for shipment. For many years this was done by means of two semi-automatic ore-car systems, the "main line" and the "Scotia line." The flavour of working on the "main line" was captured in this stanza from another early mining ballad:
The cars from the east'ard they comes very slow,
The cars from the west'ard like hell they do go,
They're took from the donkey, oh isn't that fine,
Takes 'em out on the switch, and grips them to the main line.
The "donkey" was a small engine that hoisted cars from the original surface pits onto the "main line."
This picture shows another of the technological innovations of the 1950's. The old ore car system had first been replaced by a fleet of twenty-ton diesel trucks. These were in turn replaced by a conveyor belt system, part of which is shown here. When completed, this system was said to be the longest of its type in the world. But in retrospect this distinction seems hollow. In 1959 No. 6 mine was closed and more than four hundred men lost their jobs. At this point neither the federal nor provincial governments of Canada had either the will or the policy instruments to deal with such crises. In effect Canada's politicians and administrators were still operating at the first-aid level in this murkey area of national life. Some union leaders on Bell Island advocated the nationalization of the mines but this call passed unheeded. The local member of the House of Commons in Ottawa said "that he had submitted a plan himself which could be helpful toward keeping mine No. 6 open" but this also came to nothing. This was particularly unfortunate because the magnitude of the problem that developed on Bell Island in 1959 was such that it was probably beyond the capacity of the provincial government, with its slender resources and many claimants, to solve. An imaginative federal programme might have met the emergency effectively and humanely, but Ottawa's response was, at best, piecemeal. The last years of Bell Island's history as an industrial centre perhaps illustrate above all else the failure of national social and economic planning to keep up with the demands of a drastically altered world market place and a rapidly changing technological environment.
