A Saskatchewan man is calling for changes to a rail crossing in the community of Churchbridge, after losing his wife in a fatal train collision just a month after their wedding.
Alyssa and Matthew Thompson were wed in Mexico in November 2025. It was a joyous occasion, and things were looking up for the young couple. The pair bought a house in the town of Churchbridge, Sask., just down the street from their previous rental, with Matthew calling it fate.
Their new home was filled with life, and they shared it with Alyssa’s eight-year-old son and their many rescue cats.
“[Alyssa] was charismatic, full of life and energy and she was just a beautiful soul inside and out,” Matthew told CTV News.
Whenever time allowed, the family went hiking and they loved travelling together; little trinkets hanging from their living room walls serve as reminders.
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The crash
The morning of Dec. 29, 2025, was like any other morning for the Thompson family, as Alyssa was getting ready to go to work.
“She worked at a care home, and she loved all there is to [it]. She really spent her whole life just caring for others more than she cared for herself,” he said.
Alyssa had asked Matthew to brew her coffee, then he kissed her goodbye as she left for work in her red SUV.
It was early in the morning and still dark outside. About 10 minutes later, Matthew received a text from his mother-in-law, who works at the nearby Langenburg Hospital.
“She’d heard that the ambulance got dispatched to a train accident, so I pretty much instantly just threw on my shoes and ran down the street, to the train there,” Matthew recalled.
The railroad crossing is one of two in Churchbridge, located at the end of their street, merely a few minutes from the house. There were already people on the scene of the accident, but the vehicle was out of sight.
“There was a guy standing there and I asked what kind of vehicle it was. He said it was a red SUV. And I said, ‘I think that’s my wife,’” Matthew said.
Matthew then climbed across the train to get to the other side of the tracks, but one of his acquaintances from the fire department told him not to go to the scene, confirming his fears.
“Nobody could really say anything at the time. I was asking, you know, ‘Is she responsive? Is she breathing and talking?’ type of things, but I don’t think anybody was really allowed to say [anything] until the police got there,” he said.
Matthew lost his wife that morning. Alyssa was 29 years old.
“It’s been three weeks, almost a month [since losing her]. And I still feel the same, you know ... empty,” he said.
Matthew was devastated and said he needed a few weeks to become “half normal.” He didn’t know much about the circumstances of the accident, so he reached out to the Canada Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) railway for details of the collision, wanting to know if any of the parties were at fault.
He says neither CPKC nor the RCMP Esterhazy detachment had any additional information for him, and he was not provided with the incident report either.
“They responded that they wouldn’t be releasing that information to me. I would just like some answers as towards what might have happened,” Matthew explained.
In particular, he wanted to know whether the train driver reduced speed and/or used its warning lights and sounds that morning.
A dangerous crossing
Matthew and Alyssa were aware that the crossing wasn’t equipped with lights, having lived in Churchbridge for the past four years. He told CTV News that they regularly reminded each other to be careful when passing through the intersection.
“If you stop behind the stop line, you see the house, you see the tree line, and you just see black,” he described the location. “It’s uphill, it’s slippery, it’s covered with ice most of the time.”
Matthew has been driving through it constantly when it’s dark outside, “to see what it is that she might have seen that morning.”
In his experience, drivers must get close to the tracks to see if there is a train approaching due to the obstructions, which is unsafe due to the icy surface.
“If there was a set of lights there, at least you’d know to not even pull out to look,” he added.
Calls for action
Following his wife’s death, Matthew asked the railway company to install lights at the crossing in an effort to prevent further tragedies. But he says he was told no.
“What amount of money is worth all the lives that it’s costed there?” he asked. “To me, there’s no price you could put on my wife’s life.”
According to Statistics Canada, the population of Churchbridge was just shy of 900 in 2021. Many of its residents work in the nearby towns, such as Yorkton and Esterhazy, generating a constant flow of traffic through its two railroad crossings.
CTV News reached out to both CPKC and the RCMP. While the RCMP confirmed the accident, they didn’t provide additional information.
In their response to CTV News, CPKC expressed its deepest sympathies to the family.
The railway company said the grade crossing regulations and standards are established by Transport Canada.
“The sight lines at the Lovel Street crossing are compliant with those regulations,” the statement read.
According to Transport Canada’s database, there had already been two accidents in the crossing where Alyssa lost her life. Almost exactly three years ago, a 41-year-old father was killed in a crash at the intersection. His two children were also injured.
“I’d like to hope that in the future something gets done about it, even a set of lights put in there so that we could prevent [fatal accidents] from happening to any other families in the future,” Matthew said.
The newlyweds had already booked their honeymoon for March, a trip Matthew and his stepson will go on together, bringing Alyssa’s ashes along to scatter at a place she would have loved very much.
“I think about the future, and it’s hard to imagine getting any sort of joy out of these goals we’ve made together,” he said. “When the person that I made the goals with isn’t with me anymore.”
