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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. It was later replaced by a brick station with a towered entrance. Photo courtesy of Ontario Archives, S 1627.

Railways could not locate a station on either a hill or a curve. On the upgrade it would have proved almost impossible for a larger train to start, on the downgrade difficult to stop. Furthermore, steam engines required a grade of a half-mile of level track to every foot of grade to allow for acceleration. A grade steeper than fifteen feet per mile was considered unsafe for an approach to a station. Curves were avoided to give approaching engineers ample opportunity to view any unexpected traffic sitting at a station.

Another basic requirement was water. The quantities of water needed to power the huge black boilers were so enormous that a steam engine could exhaust its reserve of water in just thirty-five kilometres.

But perhaps the most important consideration was the location of present or future paying customers. Railways were in the business of making money. And to make that money, especially when railways began to compete with each other, customers had to be pampered. Proximity was the key.

When railways passed through existing towns and cities, stations were located as close as possible to factories and stores. Passengers didn’t generate as much revenue as freight and were accordingly relegated to secondary status. It was easier and cheaper to make the passengers come to the train than to take the railway to them.

Quebec’s country villages were often close together, located on the many twisting wagon roads that wound across the countryside. To best access these customers, the railways had to locate their stations much closer together than railway operations actually required.

Woodpiles dominate the grounds around Port Perry’s first station. Such piles were an eyesore at stations before coal replaced wood as a fuel. Photo from author’s collection.

On the unpopulated prairies, the stations preceded the towns. Locations there were determined not by the existing clients but by the anticipated ones. Elevators and stations were therefore located at ten to twelve kilometre intervals, the farthest that a farmer could urge his horses over rutted prairie trails in a single day to bring his wheat to a railside grain elevator.

Another player in station location was the Board of Railway Commissioners. Created in 1903 under the new Railway Act, the board could dictate not only a station’s location, but also its design.