Because so much was packed into the little buildings, the layout was critical. All services had to be arranged within the building so that passengers, freight, and mail were all handy to the agent. And always within reach were the train order crank, the typewriter, and the telegraph key, all indispensable for train movement.
A typical agent’s office. Photo by author.
The Agent’s Office
The heart of the operation was the agent’s office, usually located in the centre of the station. A bay window protruded from the office, out over the platform to allow the agent to see down the track and to keep his eye on the platform. On the desk, set into the bay, was the all-important telegraph key. Here, the information clattered through from the dispatcher’s office to let the agent know when a train was on the way. To one side of the office was the ticket window, barred to discourage thieves, where passengers would buy their tickets or just come to chat. On the other side was the entrance to the freight room where express parcels, mail, and freight waited beside the milk cans and egg crates for shipment to the next town. Each section had separate doors on to the platform and usually separate entrances from the street. Behind the office was the door that led to the agent’s quarters.
Station operation depended as much upon what was outside the building as what was inside. The station was often surrounded by a clutch of smaller structures. Because many early stations lacked basements, a separate shed was added to store the coal or wood that the agent used to heat the building.
In remoter locations where no permanent settlement had sprung up by the track, the station was often a house for the operator and his equipment. In such areas, section houses sometimes doubled as stations.
The Wooden Arms
Another feature firmly fixed in the memories of many Canadians is the wooden order boards, or semaphores, one red and one green, poised at various angles from a pole above or beside the bay window. They gave the locomotive engineer his instructions on whether to stop or to proceed.
Originally there were no train order boards. Engineers were required to stop at each station and sign for their orders. On some early railway lines, a ball placed on top of a pole situated before the station gave the engineer permission to continue full speed ahead. The term “high balling” originated with this device and has remained in the railway lexicon ever since.
The first boards were, as the name implies, flat boards with white spots painted onto a red background. Oval in shape, the boards pivoted on a spindle and were controlled by a chain that was attached to a lever inside the agent’s office. When the board was parallel to the track, it was a “clear board” and the engineer could proceed without stopping. When the board was perpendicular to the track, the engineer must stop. Atop the spindle was a lamp with alternating red and green glass covers. When the board was in the stop position, the red glass covered the lamp. The “clear board” placed the green glass before the lamp.
The Port Stanley, Ontario, station displays an early style of order board. Photo by author.
With the introduction of the order board, the engineer no longer had to stop the train and enter the station to receive his orders. Instead, he simply slowed the engine while the agent handed them up on the end of a long hoop or fork.
By the 1880s, the order board had largely been replaced by the semaphore. Invented by a French schoolboy during the Napoleonic Wars, the semaphore soon became a universal method of long-distance signalling. The early semaphores were two-directional lower quadrant semaphores. These were eventually replaced by upper-quadrant semaphores, which pointed either up, straight out, or at a forty-five-degree angle. Up meant “go,” out meant “stop,” and the angle meant “slow.” If by some accident the mechanism broke, the arm would automatically fall into the “stop” position.
At the tiny station of Lorneville Junction in central Ontario, the order board, located at a distance from the station, mysteriously always ended up in the “stop” position, much to the frustration of train conductors. The mystery was solved when it was discovered that a local pig, fond of sticking his snout into the signal mechanism’s grease, was releasing the cog, allowing the arm to fall into the “stop” position. (This delightful anecdote is recounted by Charles Cooper in his history of the Toronto and Nipissing Railway, Narrow Gauge For Us.)
Ontario’s relocated Kleinburg Station still has the later style semaphore. Photo by author.
The Waiting Rooms
The thing that many Canadians remember most about waiting for the train is the room where they waited. Outside the home, Canadians frequented the station waiting room more than any other room in their communities. They knew its smell, the smell of the wood stove in the winter, or the kerosene from the lamp. There was also the smell of the oil rubbed into the floor; and many knew that the screen doors that would slam upon them before they could flee through the inner door. They knew the sounds — the ticking of the clock, the chattering of the telegraph key and, finally, the distant whistle of the long-awaited train.
No matter how they tried, Canadian rail travellers of the time could never forget the benches. With the square or curved backs, the benches were, as one writer recalls, “the reason you saw so many people walking up and down on the platform waiting for the train.” The CPR even had standard designs for benches, one with thin horizontal slats for use at smaller stations, and sturdier benches with wide vertical slats for “the better class stations.”
A waiting room is recreated at Stirling Ontario’s station museum. Photo by author.
Larger stations provided separate waiting rooms for ladies and men and perhaps still a third for smokers. During segregation in the southern United States, small, often cramped waiting rooms on the back of the station divided black passengers from white.
While waiting, the passenger could glance at the bulletin board located just outside the waiting-room door where the agent would post the scheduled arrival time. The Railway Act required that the arrival and departure times be written with white chalk. Failure to do so earned the agent a $5 fine plus demerits.
The Mail
Another familiar sight at the country stations was the mail cart. As the train whistle wafted from a distant crossing, the agent would wheel a creaking cart, loaded with grey canvas sacks bulging with the outgoing mail, across the wooden platform to the edge of the track.
Almost as soon as a railway opened its line it assumed mail service from the slower stagecoaches. By 1858 the Grand Trunk Railway was carrying mail between Quebec and Sarnia, the Great Western was hauling the sacks between Niagara Falls and Windsor via Hamilton, the Central Canada carted the loads between Brockville and Ottawa while the Northern moved it between Toronto and Collingwood.
The many gaps that remained in the evolving network continued to be filled by stagecoach and steamer. In 1863, as the gaps filled in, the government introduced travelling post offices. Now the trains could not only carry the mail, but sort it right on the train. Special mail cars were fitted with sorting tables, destination slots, and even washing and cooking facilities. This speeded up the procedure to the point where a letter could be posted and not only delivered the same day, but, if there was frequent train service, a reply could be received the same day as well.
The mail doesn’t always move quickly. These bags have piled up during a mail strike in the 1920s. Photo courtesy of Metro Toronto Reference Library, T 32360.
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