Right-of-way clearing, ballast handling, culvert work, and support tasks on rail and heavy infrastructure projects across Canada.
Rail projects in Canada — new light rail lines in major cities, freight rail maintenance across the Prairies, resource industry rail in BC and Alberta — create a surprising amount of work that falls to skid steers rather than larger equipment. The main reasons: rail rights-of-way are narrow, work happens in tight spaces between ballast walls and access constraints, and mobilizing excavators or bulldozers for small tasks is often cost-prohibitive.
This guide covers the tasks where a skid steer is genuinely the right tool, and the attachments that handle those tasks efficiently on Canadian rail and infrastructure projects.
Rail right-of-way maintenance — clearing brush, trees, and vegetation from the corridor alongside tracks — is a significant ongoing cost for both CP Rail and CN, as well as for regional and shortline railways like Wheeling & Lake Erie (Ontario), Southern Ontario Railway, and various provincial short lines. The same clearing work applies to hydro transmission line corridors, pipeline rights-of-way, and highway shoulders.
Mulching is the dominant method. A forestry mulcher mounted on a skid steer or CTL processes 4–8 inch diameter growth into chips without creating windrows of slash that become fire hazard. It's faster than cut-and-chip operations and leaves the ground clear for inspection and access. Fecon, FAE, and Denis Cimaf all make mulcher heads designed for this work — look for models with carbide teeth that handle the mix of hardwoods and softwoods common across most Canadian ROW corridors.
In urban contexts — LRT corridors in Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, or Metro Vancouver — the ROW clearing is more surgical. Selective tree removal near grade crossings, brush clearing for sight lines, cleanup of material that's blown or washed onto the ROW. A grapple handles selective removal more precisely than a mulcher when you need to clear one tree without disturbing everything around it.
Track ballast — the crushed stone that supports and drains the rail bed — is heavy, abrasive, and constantly needs management. On active rail, maintenance contractors handle ballast addition and tamping with specialized rail-mounted equipment. But in several scenarios, a skid steer with a rock bucket does supporting work:
The right bucket for ballast is a rock bucket — the reinforced, abrasion-resistant design with heavy side plates and a strong cutting edge that handles angular crushed aggregate without the wear problems of a standard GP bucket. A 66-inch or 72-inch rock bucket on a 70–85 hp machine can move 4–5 tonnes per hour of 3/4-inch ballast. That's not fast in absolute terms, but it's often enough for the localized repair work that rail projects need.
See our guide on road and driveway maintenance for more on aggregate handling and bucket selection for abrasive materials.
Rail embankments cross drainage channels constantly, and culverts fail — from ice damage, root intrusion, age, or undersizing after upstream changes increase flow. Culvert replacement on a rail embankment involves:
A skid steer handles the above-track slope excavation and material handling while a mini excavator typically handles the tight trench work under the track itself (where the machine width needs to be minimal and digging must be precise). The division of labor is typical on these projects: excavator in the trench, skid steer moving and managing material on the slope above.
For culvert installation, trenching attachments can be useful for the approach trench from the outlet end. Plate compactor attachments are essential for embankment backfill — rail embankments carry live load and require proper compaction in lifts to prevent settlement under train weight.
Rail proximity rules: Working near active rail requires Rail Safety Act compliance and railway authorization. CN and CP both have specific requirements for equipment working within the right-of-way, including minimum clearances from tracks (typically 3 metres for equipment with no flagging, closer with a qualified flag person present). Provincial railways have equivalent requirements. Always work with the railway's engineering and track maintenance contacts before mobilizing equipment near active track.
Urban light rail projects — the Eglinton Crosstown in Toronto, the Valley Line in Edmonton, Ottawa's O-Train expansion, Calgary's Green Line — generate enormous volumes of skid steer work at the project interface. The machines aren't doing the heavy civil work (that's excavators, dozers, large cranes), but they're doing everything adjacent:
In the urban transit construction context, a 66–72-inch GP bucket and a good set of pallet forks cover 80% of the work. The constraint is usually space — tight urban sites mean frequent repositioning and maneuvering around other trades. Machines with vertical-lift arm geometry have the reach advantage in tight spots with stacked materials.
Rail projects require construction access roads — for material delivery, for crew access, and for running support equipment to remote sections of the ROW. Building and maintaining these roads involves significant skid steer work: spreading and grading gravel base course, culverting low spots, clearing drainage ditches.
A grading blade attachment — specifically an adjustable angle blade — handles the gravel grading. A 72–84-inch blade on a mid-frame CTL can maintain a 4–5 km access road efficiently. Add a bucket for ditch cleaning and culvert repair, and one machine handles most routine road maintenance.
The materials typically used are 50mm (2-inch) crushed gravel for running surface and 150mm (6-inch) minus for base course on soft subgrade. These are angular, abrasive materials that wear cutting edges faster than topsoil or clay. Reversible cutting edges on any bucket doing this work pay for themselves quickly.
The same attachment toolkit applies to utility corridor work — buried gas transmission lines, high-voltage transmission infrastructure, and communication corridor maintenance. TC Energy and Enbridge run substantial ongoing ROW maintenance programs in BC, Alberta, and Saskatchewan that use skid steers for brush clearing and light earthwork. The attachment set is essentially identical: mulcher for vegetation, bucket for earthwork, grapple for clearing debris.
For utility locates and working near buried infrastructure, depth control matters. A bucket with a laser or depth stop system (available from some manufacturers) helps maintain consistent depth without risking contact with buried services. See our guide on pipeline and utility work attachments for more detail.
Canadian rail construction slows in winter but doesn't stop — and maintenance work continues year-round. Rail yards need snow clearing constantly; switch heaters fail and switches need to be manually cleared; outdoor maintenance facilities need access maintained. Snow pushers and blowers are standard equipment in rail yard maintenance fleets.
A 96–108-inch snow pusher on a mid-to-large CTL clears rail yard access roads and maintenance areas efficiently. Snow blowers are useful where windrow accumulation is a problem — rail yard layouts can create wind-trapped areas where pushed snow has nowhere to go. See our Canadian snow attachment guide for machine-specific sizing and hydraulic requirements.