Northern Transportation Company

Northern Transportation Company Limited (NTCL) was a marine transportation company operating primarily in the Mackenzie River watershed of the Northwest Territories and northern Alberta, and the Arctic Ocean using a fleet of diesel tug boats and shallow-draft barges. NTCL filed for bankruptcy in 2016 and its assets were acquired by the Government of the Northwest Territories later that year.

The company was an outgrowth of the competition in the Yukon between the new Northern Trading Company and the entrenched Hudson's Bay Company. Colonel J.K. Cornwell, one of the principals of the Northern Trading Company, ran his first steamer, The Midnight Sun, on the Lesser Slave Lake River in 1904. The company acted as a kind of subsidiary of the Northern Trading Company until its formal creation in 1930 as Northern Waterways Limited, but its name was changed in 1934 to the Northern Transportation Company Limited. In 1936, it was taken over by the Eldorado Gold Mines Limited and Arthur Berry was appointed manager in Edmonton. In 1944, it became a Crown corporation when its parent, then known as Eldorado Mining and Refining, was nationalized by the Government of Canada.

NTCL's water freighting activities in the early years were focused on the Athabasca/Slave/Mackenzie River systems as a means to supply the Northwest Territories and northern Alberta with freight. Mineral development, commercial sawmills, wartime strategic projects (such as the Canol pipeline in 1942), and the growth of settlements in these districts lead to a growth in demand for NTCL's services. It's flagships were the Radium Queen and Radium King both commissioned in 1937 for use on the upper and lower Slave Rivers. Other vessels in this fleet included the Radium Express, Radium Yellowknife, Radium Prince, Radium Cruiser, Radium Scout, Radium Charles, Radium Gilbert and Radium Lad, earning the fleet the name "The Radium Line". Port Radium on Great Bear Lake, a mine that supplied much of the uranium used by the Manhattan Project, and later the uranium mines on Lake Athabasca in northern Saskatchewan, were key destinations for the fleet. All of the tugs had extremely shallow draft, and mounted their propellers in cavities under their hull. Five vessels in the fleet, the George Askew, the Watson Lake, Horn River, Sandy Jane and Great Bear, did not include "Radium" in their name.

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