TOP: Canada’s railways offered up a variety of imaginative station names such as Owlseye, Alberta. Photo by author. BOTTOM: Swastika’s name raised hackles during the Second World War but the residents resisted a name change. Photo by author.
Ghost Towns
One of the more unusual station landscape legacies is the ghost town. Across the prairies region, the railways created towns by the thousands. Most were within a dozen kilometres of each other offering elevators, stations, water towers, hotels and retail and institutional services. By the 1960s the modernization of railways and grain shipment rendered most of these communities redundant and many became ghost towns.
Saskatoon’s Bessborough Hotel was completed by the CNR in the 1930s. Photo by author.
It is a heritage however that the few remaining residents are eager to celebrate. A few exceptions do stand out. Heinsburg in Alberta calls itself Alberta’s “liveliest” ghost town” while Rowley Alberta celebrates its ghost town status with a monthly pizza fest and nicknaming itself “Rowleywood” after various film shoots such as Bye Bye Blues, that have used its abandoned streetscape and vacant structures. As across the prairies, many Ontario ghost towns, usually former railside sawmill towns, languish in decrepitude. Nicholson, Benny and Milnet, one-time mill towns in northerneastern Ontario lie forgotten and uncelebrated. Depot Harbour on Georgian Bay, the grain terminus of J.R. Booth’s ambitious rail line, attracts visitors to its overgrown foundations and the shell of its railway roundhouse.
Ghost towns across Canada’s Prairie provinces are a result of modernized train and elevator operations. This is the main street of Heinsbur, Alberta, that province’s “liveliest ghost town.” Photo by author.
Uncompleted in this sketch, the first station on the Sherbrooke and Quebec Railway was as simple as they get. Illustration courtesy of CPR Archives, 5397.
3
Miserable Shanties: Canada’s First Stations
The First Shacks
“Arrived in St. John for a cold collation in the Rail Station house, which was pleasantly cool and decorated with green branches.” The date was July 21, 1836, and the occasion was the opening of Canada’s first railway station, the St. John terminus of the Champlain and St. Lawrence Railway. Built as a portage railway to shuttle freight and passengers from steamers plying the St Lawrence to those on the Richelieu River, the railway constructed primitive stations at La Prairie and Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu.
According to an 1835 report by William R. Casey, the railway’s chief engineer, they were barnlike in appearance and measured “ten feet by forty feet … substantially built and intended to be finished without unnecessary expense.”
Before that, Canada’s railways had no stations. The first rail operations were simple industrial tracks. For the construction of the Fortress of Louisburg in the 1720s, horses hauled wagons filled with quarry stone over wooden rails to the construction site. During the 1820s, Colonel John By used a short railway to drag quarry stones for the construction of the Rideau Canal at Hog’s Back Falls near Bytown (later to be known as Ottawa).
In the 1830s, when the railways in England and the United States began to carry passengers, there were few provisions for their comfort. Like the travellers on stages and ships, railway patrons were forced to purchase their tickets at the nearest inn and there await the train. Early train notices listed street intersections as points of departure. “Starts every morning from the corner of Broad and Race Street” read the ad for the pioneer fast line to Pittsburgh in 1837.
The first building in North America to be called a railway station is considered by many to be that of the Baltimore & Ohio Railway at Mount Clare, Baltimore, and now exists as a museum. Even so, this large brick building at first contained only a ticket booth and had no accommodation for passengers.
Railway builders had no idea as to what a station should be or what it should look like. They were not always referred to as “stations,” as some travellers preferred the traditional stagecoach term of “stopping place.” Indeed, the Mount Clare station was designed after a toll house.
A classical painting by A. Sheriff Scott depicts the first station of the Montreal and Lachine Railway. Like many of the early North American stations, it was little more than a train shed that resembled a large wooden barn with a track through the middle. It was lit by large windows and capped by a cupola. “The terminal at this end,” wrote the Montreal Witness on the station’s opening in 1847, “though not boasting of much architectural ornament, will be a very spacious and comfortable building.” It was situated at the corner of Bonaventure Street and St. Antoine Street, near the site of the later Bonaventure Station. The M and L was also a portage railway, a ten-kilometre route that simply bypassed the Lachine Rapids of the St. Lawrence River.
A painting by A. Sheriff Scott depicts the opening of the Montreal and Lachine Railway in 1847. The “station” was little more than a covered train shed with minimal facilities for staff and passengers. Courtesy CNR Archives.
By the time Canada’s first major railway line, the St. Lawrence and Atlantic, was completed in 1853, station planners were paying more attention to the needs of their passengers. Montreal’s Longeuil station, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, was described by the Montreal Gazette of 1848 as “a large and handsome structure, two hundred and thirty feet in length by sixty feet in width” which, along with the next large station in St-Hyacinthe, contained offices and waiting rooms. Architecturally, however, it was still a train shed; a track and platform under a single roof more closely resembling an engine house than the trackside station that today’s Canadians remember.
In Ontario, the first railway, the Erie and Ontario Railroad Company, likewise began as a horse-drawn portage line, built to bypass Niagara Falls. Its terminus at Queenston consisted of a primitive shed and warehouse, while that at Chippewa was a steamboat wharf. After it was absorbed by the Michigan Central, it was extended to both Niagara-on-the-Lake and Fort Erie. It began to promote tourism and added tourist stations at Niagara Falls, as well as several way stations at frequent intervals along its route.
Location, Location, Location
After 1850, railway madness swept North America. By 1870, over seventy railway charters had been approved (although many of them were never started). One of the first problems to resolve was where to put the stations. Railway engineers had to consider the location of wood, water, the existence of towns or villages, the willingness of landowners to sell at reasonable prices, and natural obstacles like hills and valleys.
Collingwood’s first station was a board-and-batten structure still surrounded by the blackened stumps of the newly cleared town site.