Straddling the border between Alberta and Montana, on what was then the Great Falls and Canada Railway, stretched a long wooden customs station. This elongated structure not only fulfilled the role of a point of customs entry, but was also a restaurant to feed those waiting clearance. The two-storey station, with extensions on each end, was built in 1890 and continued to fill this role until 1917. In 2000, it was moved to Stirling, Alberta, and resides now in the Galt Historic Railway Park, where its history preserved for visitors.
Other customs stations, including those at Lacolle, Quebec, and Niagara Falls, Ontario, have processed passengers travelling on cross-border Amtrak trains from Montreal and Toronto respectively, en route to New York City. A former customs station still stands on the CP line at Emerson, Manitoba.
Union Stations
Many Canadians may remember their stations as being “union” stations, stations shared by two or more railway lines. To the railway companies, union stations were as welcome as a shotgun wedding and were in some ways similar.
Fiercely independent and highly competitive, the railway companies preferred their own stations. Through the architecture and/or the location of their stations they were able to advertise their prominence and their independence. But high land values and the economics of train operations often produced reluctant bedfellows.
As urban Canada boomed in the 1890s, cities grew, railways arrived, and stations soon needed replacing. Skyrocketing land values, or simply the lack of downtown land, forced competing railways to pool resources and build a common station that both could use.
Passenger convenience was another, although secondary, consideration. It was much easier to change trains within the same building than to retrieve luggage and endure foul weather and traffic to reach a separate station to catch a connecting train.
TOP: An early painting depicts Toronto’s first “Union” station. Courtesy Metro Toronto Reference Library. BOTTOM: Toronto’s next union station was much more grand. Photo courtesy Metro Toronto Reference Library, T 12190.
Canada’s first “union” station was built in Toronto in 1855. A modest board-and-batten building, it served the Grand Trunk and Great Western Railways. Shortly thereafter, the Great Western moved out and, in 1866, built a station of its own on the west side of Yonge Street. The first Ontario, Simcoe, & Huron station was a simple wooden building that lacked even a train shed. The first Grand Trunk was a two-storey brick stub station, small, but at least with a train shed. The Northern, likewise, had a shed but with a through track rather than a stub. By far the most elaborate of the three first stations was that of the Great Western, with four tracks emanating from beneath Romanesque arches above.
But it would be short-lived, for Toronto was booming. In 1858, a second station opened to replace it and, in 1872, a third. However, passengers still had to scurry between seven other downtown stations. Then, in 1876, a large stone station with three domes replaced the seven stations. Despite extensive additions in 1895 — extensions that obliterated its original charm — it too became obsolete.
The great Toronto fire of 1904 cleared several blocks of downtown land for redevelopment. A parcel just east of the station (that had not been damaged in the fire) was ideally situated for a new union station. To build the new station, the GTR and the CPR formed the Toronto Terminals Railway Company. As was often the case, the two companies could agree on very little. While the CPR wanted the station to be a stub station with the tracks at ground level, the GTR wanted a through station with elevated tracks, a design that would reopen Toronto’s lost waterfront to its populace.
In the end, the Board of Railway Commissioners approved the GTR plan. As construction dragged interminably on, the CPR, impatient at the delays, stalked out and built its own station, the beautiful North Toronto station, a considerable distance north on Yonge Street, and far from what was then the centre of the city. Completed in 1916, the striking stone building with its Italianate clock tower also functioned as a “union” station, with operations shared between the CPR and the Canadian Northern Railway.
After several years of delay, the new union station by the lakefront was finally ready for use, On August 6, 1927, the Duke of Windsor, in what was probably the briefest opening ceremony for a station anywhere, declared the station open in a thirteen-minute ceremony and then boarded a train for his ranch in Alberta.
Although elaborate, the Grand Trunk’s Bonaventure station in Montreal was never a “union” station. Photo courtesy of CNR Archives, 44365.
By contrast, Montreal, Toronto’s metropolitan rival, never had a union station. Like Toronto, Montreal was the hub of many railway lines. The Grand Trunk; the Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa and Occidental; the CPR; and the Canadian Northern all had terminals in or near central Montreal, some more than one. Even as late as the 1920s, after the Canadian National Railway had absorbed the Grand Trunk and Canadian Northern Railways, central Montreal could still count nine stations, four of which belonged to the CPR alone.
The Grand Trunk began operations between Toronto and Montreal in 1856 and constructed a wooden station at the corner of St. Antoine and Bonaventure. Prior to building their magnificent Windsor station, the CPR used the Dalhousie Square station at the end of a spur line into the city centre from the Hochelaga station on its newly acquired QMO and O line. (The Dalhousie Square station has managed to survive and today houses a circus company.)
In downtown Montreal, Windsor Station was the stub station for CPR lines going west, Viger for those leading east. Following its creation in 1918, The Canadian National still maintained the former Grand Trunk Bonaventure Station and the Canadian Northern’s Tunnel Station. Around the periphery of the core the CPR had stations at Westmount, Montreal West, and Mile End, while the CNR stations were on St. Henri and Moreau Street.
Then, in the 1930s, the CNR began to dig up the ground at the site of the Tunnel Station and proposed a union station for Montreal. With two solid downtown stations already in place, the CPR rejected the idea. A depression and a war intervened and the new station remained just a hole in the ground. Finally, following the war, the Gare Centrale opened, but it accommodated only the CNR. Although it is now Montreal’s main railway terminal, it never became a union station.
Named after a nearby village, the flag stop station at Union was never a “union” station. Photo by author.
Vancouver’s first union station was not even Canadian. In 1915 the Great Northern Railway, an American line, opened a large building to replace an earlier shack. For a number of years it shared the building with another American line, the Northern Pacific. By the 1950s passenger traffic had declined to a trickle and the GNR moved in with the CNR in a grand station next door. Then, in 1964, the GNR demolished the remarkable old structure in order to unburden itself of high land taxes.
Ottawa’s first union station was not the better-known structure that stands today as a convention centre, but an earlier station built by the CPR. Designed in its trademark château-esque style, the Broad Street building housed both the CPR and the New York Central Railway. Then, after the Grand Trunk opened its new neo-classical station on the site of the Canada Atlantic Railway station, the CPR shut its Broad Street station and moved into the new building.
Between 1890 and 1920, several Canadian cities gained handsome union stations. A CPR “chateau” replaced two earlier stations in Quebec City, while large “classical” union stations served Thunder Bay, Regina, Halifax, and Saint John, New Brunswick.
North Bay’s