The town became “Bridgeburg” in 1894 and then amalgamated with Fort Erie. The Grand Trunk station with its conical “witch’s hat” waiting room was demolished; however, another of the Fort Erie stations was relocated to a nearby museum.
A station located apart from an existing village created an equally indelible imprint upon Canada’s landscapes: the station village. Most were tiny satellites to the parent village and typically consisted of a hotel or two, a store, a café, and a handful of houses for railway employees.
A few station villages, however, boomed and completely overwhelmed the parent. Canterbury Station in New Brunswick was one. It developed around the station of the New Brunswick and Canada Railway, a dozen miles from the original settlement on the St. John River. Within a decade it had matched the old site in size and then, when the water-powered industries of the decaying old town became outmoded, Canterbury Station became the more important of the two.
Maynooth Station is an example of such a station location sparking a new satellite village. Photo by author.
Even more dramatic was the growth of Killaloe Station on the Ottawa, Arnprior, and Parry Sound Railway in Ontario. As early as the 1840s and 1850s, Killaloe was a small but busy mill village. However, in the 1890s, John Booth and his railway builders chose a route three kilometres north, and the station village quickly outgrew the old mill village. Today, Killaloe Station is simply called Killaloe and claims a population of over six hundred. The older village has shrunk to a tiny clutch of homes huddled around the old general store and mill.
But the impact of the railway station upon the urban landscape can just as easily be overstated, for often there was none. Along branch lines with little activity, stations were mere flag stops. Structures were little more than enclosed shelters, and, if the passengers were fortunate, equipped with a stove. More usually, however, they were unheated and about the size of an outhouse. Here the station remained alone on the landscape, often a solitary silhouette against an open sky.
Station Landscapes
Despite the different shapes that the railways created in towns east and west, the landscapes that immediately surrounded the station were more or less similar. They had to be.
Part and parcel of Canada’s station landscape were the water tanks. The steam engines’ heavy appetite for water meant that a reliable and frequent water supply was essential. The tanks themselves were steel, a bulbous barrel atop stocky legs and pipes. Throughout most of the country, however, frigid winters could freeze solid even an entire tank of water. To prevent freezing, a protective wooden shell was built around the tanks. Inside the shell a stove and pump kept the water both moving and thawed during the winter. At some eastern Ontario stations the lower section of the shell was of local stone rather than wood.
While freight stations were seldom a dominant part of the station landscape in Canada, that of the CPR in Kingston, Ontario, was unusually elaborate. Illustration courtesy of Queen’s Archives.
A rod that pierced the roof of the tank rested on a floating ball and alerted maintenance crews to the level of the water inside. In the early days of Canada’s stations, before municipal water pipes were constructed and extended to the water tanks, windmills beside the tanks pumped the water from a well into the tank. In Avonlea, Saskatchewan, water had to be piped from a lake several kilometres away.
In the early days, coal was loaded from the coal pile onto the coal tenders by a bucket or scoop on the end of a swivel. This awkward process was replaced by the coal dock or tipple. A much more efficient system, the coal was stored in an overhead bin and when the tender was underneath, the operator would simply open the chute and fill the tender. During the 1920s these dark and dusty towers became an integral part of the station landscape, particularly at divisional stations. Avonlea foreman Jack Dalrymple tried to brighten his dusty coal tower by placing geraniums in the coal dock window.
The most visible and enduring element of the prairie station landscape was the grain elevator. Prairie grain, after all, was the reason why the railways were there in the first place. To avoid the distinctive aromatic unpleasantness of having a steady stream of horse-drawn wagons lining the towns’ streets, the elevator companies located their elevators opposite the station and the town. As grain traffic increased, however, the lines of wagons grew so long that they frequently blocked the tracks and disrupted train movement. In response, the railways made land available for elevators only on the same side of the tracks as the towns and stations, but at a considerable distance from the town centres.
TOP: The water tower in Barry’s Bay, Ontario, is Ontario’s only surviving wooden water tower and sits near the former Booth Line station. Photo by author. BOTTOM: The residents in the “ghost town” of Heinsburg, Alberta, have preserved their water tower and their station. Photo by author.
The late 1990s saw the beginning of the end of the prairie grain elevator. The shift to more modern roadside grain terminals led to the mass obliteration of these iconic trackside sentinels. Only where these have been modernized, or specifically preserved, do the prairie elevators yet stand tall. Elevators in places like Nanton and Acadia Valley in Alberta, Hepburn SA and Inglis MA have become grain elevator interpretation centres, Eastern Canada too could proclaim trackside grain elevators. However, when the grain industry moved west beginning in the 1880s, most were demolished. A few gained a new existence as feed mills. Some however have been saved for their heritage value, including those in Pontypool, Port Perry and Unionville, all in Ontario.
As pioneer farmers struggled to clear the trees, the saw mill became a common sight beside most stations. But once the forests were cleared, the saw mills closed. As farming became increasingly profitable, the railways began to move farm products to market, and grain elevators, more usually associated with the prairie landscape, became a common sight in Ontario and Quebec.
Stockyards too were a common element of the station’s immediate landscape. Towns often vied vigorously with each other for a stockyard at the station. Even where cattle were not raised locally, regulations required that, while en route to market, livestock had to be off-loaded at regular intervals for exercise.
In divisional towns the landscape around the stations were heavily dominated by railway structures. Beside the station — sometimes in them — a restaurant provided meals for passengers waiting for the engine to be serviced and for the crews to change shifts. Usually the restaurants were franchised out to private operators, although sometimes they were operated by the railways themselves. At any event they provided economy-minded travellers with a less expensive alternative to the more costly dining car.
Sorting yards, roundhouses, engine sheds, and coal tipples dominated the sprawling station grounds. Behind the station, bunkhouses, hotels, or occasionally YMCAs would house train crews awaiting their return shift.
Divisional towns were home to the railway crews. To attract good workers, preferably family men, the railways provided permanent housing. Styles were often reminiscent of the stations themselves. But in all cases the houses could be readily distinguished by their rigid rows and identical designs.