By 1910, most of the gaps had been filled and nearly every Canadian could send or receive mail by rail. The trains became rolling post offices. Inside the lurching mail cars, sorters pored through the sacks, separating the mail for the next stations. If the train was approaching a flag stop with no passengers to board, the sorters would wrestle open the door and give the mail sack a hefty kick. On occasion, the boot would come too late and the sack would miss the platform and end up in a heap at the bottom of a ditch.
Mail to be picked up was dangled from a hook on a wooden post, a device known as a crane. As the mail car passed the crane, a hook protruding from the mail car door snared the sack. If the mail car was not equipped with a hook, one of the clerks would lean perilously out and clutch the dangling sack as the train eased past. The clerks inside grabbed it and poured its contents onto the table and began their sorting anew.
Many stations had post offices of their own and here the townspeople crowded around waiting to receive the long-awaited letter from home, the Farmer’s Almanac, or the latest Eaton’s catalogue.
Wartime witnessed a tremendous crush of mail. On November 20, 1942, staff at Montreal’s Windsor Station ploughed through enough mail to fill seventeen mail cars destined for the Atlantic ports, thirteen cars on one train alone. Each mail car could accommodate six hundred sacks of mail.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the dramatic drop in passenger traffic made many of the smaller passenger lines heavily dependent upon the mail contract for revenue. But other ways of carrying the mail were being explored. The Canadian Post Office had started its first air mail service in northern Manitoba in 1927 and, by 1948, began air mail delivery to anywhere in the world. Then, in 1971, the Canadian Post Office turned almost all its mail service over to the airlines. This final move turned marginal passenger lines into money-losers, and most were shut down. The mail had found other ways to get through and now the passengers had to do the same.
Fruit being loaded at the station in Grimsby, Ontario. It was not unusual to ship 70,000 baskets of peaches in a season, or 1,500 crates of strawberries over a two-day period. Photo courtesy of Ontario Archives, 16856-20025.
Freight
Milk cans, egg crates, fruit, and maple syrup containers crowded the darkened freight room beside the agent’s office. If there was a greater revenue generator to the railways than passengers and mail, it was freight. Railways moved everything that needed to be moved.
Most stations had a loading platform separate from the station itself from which large items could be loaded or off-loaded. Although in Canada freight sheds were usually part of the passenger station, (these were often called “combination” stations) some communities were so busy that a separate freight building was needed. The English-style stone stations that the Grand Trunk Railway constructed along its Montreal-to-Sarnia line contained no freight facilities, so the freight had to be stored in a separate wooden structure. Occasionally, and especially in the US, freight buildings had their own office, and sometimes their own distinctive styles. In fact, some US freight stations were larger and more elaborate than the passenger depots.
In early eastern Canada, the main freight products were lumber and farm products. Near Allandale, Ontario, a wooden railway track linked a saw mill in the great Pine Plains to the small station at Tioga. Horses drew the timber along the flimsy track to the station where it was winched onto flatcars, the longer logs requiring three flatcars. During lumbering’s heyday in the 1850s, timber trains would depart the Allandale station every ten minutes, destined for construction sites in Toronto.
In many areas, specialized products dominated. At Grimsby, once the heart of Canada’s now-dwindling fruit belt, the trains might creak away from the platform with seventy thousand baskets of peaches, even in an average season. In 1896, fifteen hundred crates of strawberries left Jordan Station for Montreal within just a two-day period. Prior to its absorption by the Grand Trunk, the Great Western Railway promised delivery of fruit from the Niagara fruit belt to Montreal or Ottawa by six o’clock the following morning.
While in southern Ontario and Quebec, station platforms would regularly be crowded with egg crates, milk cans, salted fish, coal oil, and farm machinery; in northern Ontario, freight was more likely to consist of lumber, stacks of beaver pelts, or ingots of gold and silver.
TOP: A load of precious silver waits unattended at Cobalt, Ontario, during the town’s silver rush. Photo courtesy of Ontario Archives, S 13600. BOTTOM: In Biscotasing, in northern Ontario, a pile of furs is ready to ship. Photo courtesy of Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources.
Occasionally, freight delivery would become something of a community event. One local newspaper reported the arrival of a shipment of farm machinery at the Londesborough station in western Ontario. “A busy scene took place at the station in the delivery of some [twenty-five] mowing and reaping machines from the celebrated factory of D. Maxwell of Paris.… After they were all loaded they all made a grand procession to the village hotel where the owner provided a sumptuous repast for the entire company of about [fifty] people.”
Some freight was live and required special treatment. Federal regulations insisted that animals be off-loaded at regular intervals for exercise, watering, and feeding. Local children often earned a dollar or so helping the agent to unload stock and keep them watered.
TOP: For a brief period, buffalo bones were gathered by the Plains Indians for shipment. The bones would later be made into fertilizer. Photo courtesy of Glenbow Archives, NA 4967-10. BOTTOM: Typical baggage awaits loading in the baggage room of the Caledonia station. Photo by author.
Probably the most bizarre commodity to decorate the station grounds, if only briefly, was buffalo bones. The arrival of the railways upon the prairies in the 1880s, and the settlement that went with it, decimated the huge herds of buffalo. The great grasslands were strewn with millions of tons of dry and bleached bones of these once mighty beasts — bones that could be pulverized into valuable fertilizer. To cash in on this short-lived bounty, the Natives and Metis gathered up the bones and brought them to the stations where they received $5 per ton. Such a sight earned Regina its first name, “Pile O’ Bones.”
In December of each year, the freight ledgers would show a completely different array of items: pails of candies, fruitcakes and biscuits, boxes of silk, bags of oranges, and whisky by the barrel, all destined for Christmas festivities. One such barrel was spied by a group of thirsty residents of Avonlea in Saskatchewan. To avoid detection they crept along the station platform, unnoticed, and drilled into the barrel with a brace and bit and carried off the contents — some in containers, some in their stomachs.
Hot Off the Wire
One of the sounds many Canadians remember in their local station was the clatter of the telegraph key; way stations often contained the only telegraph facility in town. Initiated in 1844, along the Baltimore and Ohio Railway in the US, the telegraph was introduced into Canada in 1846 by the Toronto, Hamilton, and Niagara Electrical Magnetic Telegraph Company. The Grand Trunk Railway adopted its use in 1856, and by 1860, the telegraph had eliminated the risky guesswork involved in locating the trains. The dispatcher at each divisional point would click out the departure of each train and the station agent in turn would key back whenever the train would pass his station.
As early as 1896, when CPR telegraphers went on strike, the company resorted to the newly invented telephone. However, the company felt that written orders