Approaching Churchill’s port by train, the twin grain towers appear from kilometers away across the tundra.

It’s 25 below in April, and Hudson Bay is trapped under a layer of ice as deep as three meters. This tourist town of 850 people and its increasingly strategic port is asleep — waiting for a spring ice breakup that is still months away.

For nearly a century, the port at Churchill has languished as a great western hope, repeatedly dashed — the terminus of North America’s rail system at sub-Arctic tidewater — where politics and geography have conspired to make this place more a dead end than the apex of a great trade corridor.

But Churchill’s fortunes are changing.

The under-used seaport and its flood-prone rail line have been transformed from a white elephant into a nation-building

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