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What is a station?

Confusion often exists between the terms “station” and “depot.” As defined in railway timetables, a “station” is a “stopping place” and need not be a structure. In fact, it may be nothing more than a siding, a platform, or a mail hook. “Depot,” an American term, refers to the building itself. Nevertheless, in Canada the word “station” popularly refers to that wonderful old building, with its semaphore, its bay window, its platform, and its waiting room full of memories.

No matter what it was called, the station was vital for train operations and for customers. On the operational side, it housed offices for administrators, provided sidings and yards for rolling stock, maintenance and fuel for the locomotives, equipment for the orderly movement of trains, and shelter and food for the train crews. The station was a place to work, to live, and to play; it was the architectural pride of the community, and was the building that, more than any other, determined the layout of the community. But its fundamental role was to serve the railway and to serve the customer, and everything about the layout, the location and the equipment of the station, supported these two functions.

For its customers, the station was where they shipped parcels, bought money orders or sent telegrams; it was where they picked up their mail or loaded their farm produce; it was where they hurried down a meal during crew changes; it was where they bought their tickets for a trip around the world or just to the next town, and it was where they awaited the train that would take them there.

Clearly, a station could be many things, and the number of functions it had determined what kind of station it was. A station could range from something as simple as shelter for passengers with a platform for freight and a mail crane, to a large urban palace with everything from executive suites to shoeshine stands. In between were the divisional stations, and the most common of all, the way stations.

The Country Stations

Also known as way stations, or operator stations, it is the country stations that many small-town residents still remember. After all, nearly every town had one. All the jobs the railway had to perform in a small town were there, packed under one roof. They remember the agent’s office with its barred window, the large oak desk with its typewriter, telegraph and telephone, and the piles of forms everywhere. Outside, they remember the wooden semaphores perched at various angles, the water tank looming down the track, the farm products piled high on the platform, and the canvas bags bulging with mail resting on the wagon. And they remember the waiting room with its smell of kerosene and the sound of the ticking clock.

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.

In 1868, Timothy Eaton, owner of the famous Toronto department store of the same name, introduced the mail-order system. Through his catalogue, a Canadian anywhere could order an item and Eaton’s would send it by train. Thus began a Canadian institution that would last over a century.

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 reinforced the personnel hierarchy and returned to the telegraph as its primary source of communication, once the strike had ended. The telegraph was not only vital to the railway for train movement, but turned into a major money-maker as well. By the end of the 1860s, two telegraph companies dominated Canada: the Montreal Telegraph Company and the Dominion Telegraph Company. In 1880, the Great Northwestern Telegraph Company was created and provided linkages between Ontario and Manitoba. In 1882, CPR’s general manager, William Van Horne, recognizing potential profits, propelled the CPR into commercial telegraphy with its acquisition of Dominion Telegraph.

By 1905, the Canadian Northern Railway had forged Canada’s second transcontinental rail link and established its own telegraph subsidiary. In 1915, it added to that network by acquiring the Great Northwestern, which by then was bankrupt.

During this period all newsgathering and distribution was controlled by the large telegraph companies. Weather, disasters, stock market quotations, sports or election results reached into all corners of Canada by telegraph. Commercial telegraphy allowed Canadians to wire messages to family, or to send or receive money through money orders, and so the local station became a focus for yet another community function: maintaining social, familial, and professional bonds. As the railway stations often contained the only commercial telegraph office in town, they were the community’s ear to the outside.

In 1918, the CNoR was bankrupt and its assets, telegraph included, were absorbed by the new government railway, the Canadian National. By the 1920s, Canada had two of its own telegraph companies, the CN and the CP. In 1967 they finally joined forces to become the giant CNCP Telecommunications that exists to this day.

In 1912, the interior of the water tank at Boissevain, Manitoba, also doubled as an office of sorts. Photo courtesy of Provincial Archives of Manitoba.

Fuelling Stops

Many of the way stations were also fuelling locations. Steam locomotives needed two ingredients, water and fuel. Once the wood-burning era passed and coal became the universal fuel, coal tipples and storage sheds were built at divisional stations. But the distance between the divisional points was too great for engines to travel without refuelling. To supplement the supply, coal docks were placed at many way stations.

But far more common at way stations were the water tanks. Because the steam locomotives so frequently needed water for the boilers, water tanks were located at every other station. To access the water in larger towns and cities, the railway simply hooked on to the municipal water system. In the early days, when piped water was often unavailable, the railways erected windmills beside the tank to pump the water to the tank. With the arrival of the coal era, coal-fired pumps were placed beneath the tank, sometimes in a separate pumphouse, sometimes within the enclosed water tank itself. The pumps served two purposes: besides keeping the tank full, the pumps in the winter also kept the water heated and moving, and prevented the supply from freezing solid.

As railway expansion accelerated during the latter years of the nineteenth century, and as technology changed, many early way stations lost some of their functions and were downgraded. When the CPR and the Grand Trunk took over many smaller branch lines during the late 1800s, they increased the train length but reduced their frequency and the number of required station agents. As a result, many of the stations built to house operators were downgraded to caretaker or flag stations. Although they retained their bay windows, they became as silent as the lonely country shelters that they had in fact become.

This early CPR divisional station at Fort William, Ontario, has since been replaced. Photo courtesy of CPR Archives, A 16826.

The Divisional Stations

Divisional stations were the nerve centre for railway operations. Located at intervals of roughly 150 kilometres, these stations were where locomotives were refuelled and maintained, where rolling stock was sorted and made up into trains, and where train crews ended or started their shifts.

Divisional stations provided facilities for coal storage, water changing, and engine maintenance. They also provided offices for staff. Yardmasters oversaw the makeup of trains, dispatchers alerted the agents along the line of their departure, and roadmasters supervised the maintenance of the track and rights of way along which the trains travelled. Divisional facilities might be small on lightly used branch lines, but on the main lines they were often the reason for a town’s entire existence.

Ontario’s White River Station was created as a divisional point where VIA Rail’s “Superior” awaits its morning departure. Photo by author.

Divisional points were where many of the railway men lived. To house the train crews, and to encourage family men to work in these often isolated locations, the railways provided substantial housing. They built bunkhouses for crews in transit, and at smaller divisional points the crew were boarded in local hotels or boarding houses, or in later years in a railway YMCA that the railway constructed for rest and recreation.

Even divisional stations might differ in function. Many divisional points developed into huge operations. The CN divisional point at Hornepayne in Ontario still functions with massive yards and buildings that cover more than 150 hectares. By contrast, Manyberries in Alberta contained little more than a small roundhouse and a watershed. Like many of the little branch line divisional stations, it existed solely to service steam locomotives. A few sidings, a coal dock, and an engine house that might contain only a single stall huddled around the small yards. Forty-seven such smaller terminals existed within the CPR network in Alberta and Saskatchewan alone.

During steam days, a train might spend an hour at a divisional station while the engine was watered, coaled, and otherwise tended to. To cater to impatient passengers, the railways instituted restaurants.

Some were housed in a separate building occasionally attached to the station by a walkway, others were located in the station themselves. These early structures were at first simple two-storey buildings and might contain sleeping quarters for the crew, in addition to a restaurant. Later on, stations added lunch counters right in the station building itself, and the separate restaurant building eventually disappeared from the station landscape. At the divisional point of Fort Frances, Ontario, the Canadian Northern’s original turreted wooden station was moved a few yards away and became a restaurant when the railway replaced it with a larger brick station. In Temagami, Ontario, the original station became a restaurant following the erection of a new, more elaborate Tudoresque stone station.

Patrons enjoy a meal in the CPR divisional station restaurant at Smiths Falls, Ontario. Photo courtesy of CP Archives, 25655.

In smaller communities the railways would contract out the lunch service to a local hotel or café. The Grand Trunk station at Kingston went further and, according to an advertisement, offered this added feature: “Passengers going east or west by the night trains may avoid much unpleasant inconvenience arising from being disturbed at unreasonable hours by driving to the railway station early in the evening where they can obtain comfortable bedrooms and an undisturbed sleep till the hour of departure for the train.”

Then, as snack bar service was introduced right in the coaches, providing the long-awaited inexpensive alternative to the dining cars, as diesel replaced steam and eliminated the need for lengthy stops at divisional points, the lunchrooms were closed and the space converted to offices for divisional staff.

At Cartier, Ontario, the large wooden CPR station contained the restaurant right in the building, a restaurant that later became the roadmaster’s office. At Orangeville, the original separate restaurant building was converted to crew quarters and later became the “station” for a new short-line operation. The original station itself was relocated and was converted into a restaurant. Far to the north in Cochrane, Ontario, the much altered CN/ONR station has been expanded to include not only a larger restaurant, but a motel and ticket office for passengers awaiting the departure of the ONR’s Polar Bear Express to Moosonee, or the Northlander to Toronto.

Next up the pyramid were the regional headquarters. More wide-ranging in function than divisional stations, these housed the railway bureaucracy. To administer the complicated business of running a railway, they divided the country into regions, each with its own headquarters. Station plans were often devised in the regional headquarters. Here, too, executives huddled in panelled boardrooms while department heads tallied statistics for the year.

While stations were usually part of the headquarters building, they were secondary at best. The CPR’s Windsor Station in Montreal, originally the national head office, the Algoma Central’s Bruce Street in Sault Ste Marie, and the Newfoundland Railway’s St. John’s terminal are all examples of station/headquarters. By contrast, the handsome limestone head office of the Ontario Northland Railway in North Bay never contained a station, the railway sharing a station with CN elsewhere in town.

Many divisional yards remain in use across Canada, as do their historic divisional stations. Although in many cases those functions have been reduced, or ceased, these stations still stand in places like Senneterre in Quebec, Schreiber, Kenora, and Thunder Bay (Fort William CP) in Ontario, and Wynyard, Humboldt, and Wainwright in Saskatchewan. In other instances, while the yards remain, the histrionic stations no longer survive, having been replaced with newer structures.

Special Stations

Commuter Stations

The success of Ontario’s GO commuter system and Montreal’s SCTUM are really nothing new. More prevalent in the United States, where urban sprawl had despoiled the landscape even in the 1860s, commuter stations began to appear in Canada toward the end of the nineteenth century. In Fredericton, New Brunswick, workers would cluster in the pre-dawn at the Queen Street station to board the train that would take them to the mills at Marysville. At 8:30 a.m. the same train would return to Fredericton filled with restless students for the high school.

TOP: One of Toronto’s suburban stations was this delightful station at Davenport. Photo courtesy of City of Toronto archives, Salmon, 1057A. BOTTOM: In 1913 the Toronto Belt Line’s commuter station at Moore Park reflected the upscale neighbourhood that surrounded it. The line lasted only months. Photo courtesy of the Metro Toronto Reference Library, T 12185.

During the 1880s and 1890s, when Montreal was becoming a booming port, commuter lines radiated out from the city, north to suburbs like Mount Royal and Roxboro, and west to places like Westmount, Beaconsfield, Valois, and Pointe-Claire.

Suburban lines were initially less successful around Toronto — one was a failure nearly from the day it commenced operations. In 1888, a group of Toronto land speculators, anxious to encourage a housing boom around the city, built the Toronto Beltline Railway. Large, elaborate stations were built at Moore Park and Lambton Mills while smaller structures appeared in Forest Hill beside Bathurst Street, at Fairbanks beside Dufferin Street, at Lambton Mills near Scarlet Road, and at Rosedale in the Don Valley. Rather than radiate from the core of the city, the line ignored commuting patterns and encircled it. It failed within two years and was leased to the Grand Trunk for freight operation. Short sections continued as CN freight stubs until the 1970s. Of the six stations, none have survived and only three — Moore Park, Lambton Mills, and Davenport (Bathurst Street) — were even photographed. Moore Park burned following the Second World War, Rosedale burned around the same time, while the station at Lambton Mills stood as a residence until the 1960s.

The early CNR industrial station at Leaside is now privately owned. Photo by author.

Like Montreal, a number of Toronto’s main line stations served double duty as commuter stations. Those at Main Street (known as York), Riverdale, St. Clair, Sunnyside, Davenport, two at West Toronto, and two at Parkdale, all served this function.

A brief commuter service on Vancouver Island once shuttled wealthy lakeside residents from Shawinigan Lake into Victoria to work, but the service was dropped in 1907.

The early Great Western station at Niagara Falls holds an Amtrak train for its customs inspection while a VIA train waits to head back to Toronto. Photo by author.

Industrial Stations

Although fewer in number than commuter stations, another form of special station was the industrial station. These were never intended to be passenger stations, nor did they offer the range of functions of the way stations. They were intended purely to control the heavy rail traffic in and out of industrial complexes.

The Clarabelle station near Sudbury was one. Originally a way station on the Algoma Eastern Railway, it became an industrial station when the CPR acquired that line, stubbed it, and turned it into an industrial spur to serve the huge nickel smelters. Because of the enormous flow of traffic, the station became one of the busiest in Canada. In the 1980s the old wooden structure was replaced by one of aluminum, serving only as a shelter for maintenance workers.

In 1912, the CNoR laid out a huge industrial and residential area northeast of Toronto’s then urban fringe. It would later develop into the upscale village of Leaside, one of Canada’s first railway-planned towns. To access the industries, the railway obtained running rights over CPR trackage and, in the shadow of the factories, built an industrial station. A functional but solid brick building, CN’s Leaside station retained its railway function until the early 1980s before becoming a retail office. That structure now serves as an office for Safe Passage Canada. Meanwhile, the CNoR’s former engine repair shop, long abandoned, was designated as a heritage building and now houses a Longo’s supermarket. Much of the interior still reflects its original purpose.

Special Operations

Some special stations were added for specific operational functions. Port Union, Ontario, a small lake port, sat at the base of steep grades in both directions. Engines strained to haul long trains up the hills. To ease the operation, the Grand Trunk built a station and yards to store special helper engines that supplemented the power of the regular engines. While a new GO station stands nearby, the site of the GTR station and yards have been replaced by new suburban development.

The Canadian Northern station in Rainy River Ontario was built at the border with Minnesota. Photo by author.

Customs Stations

With the world’s longest undefended border existing between Canada and the US, dozens of railway lines once crossed from one country into the other. Customs and revenue procedures needed to be followed. All border crossings therefore needed facilities for customs and revenue officers, even though the stations may not be needed for revenue or operational purposes. At many of the prairie crossings, stations literally sat across the invisible line from each other. Solid brick customs stations built by the Canadian Northern Railway occupied opposite sides of the Rainy River, in Baudette, Minnesota, and Rainy River, Ontario.

Lacolle, Quebec, boasts a unique castle-like station built by the Delaware and Hudson Railway. Being a customs point for incoming US tourists, the company splurged on a chateau-esque stone “castle” that they believed would give their passengers a flavour of old Quebec.

Possibly the widest range of uses found in what was otherwise a simple small-town station were those contained in the White Pass and Yukon Route railway station in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. Built from Skagway to Whitehorse in 1900, the railway actually crossed into Canada near a place called Carcross. However, because most travellers were bound for Whitehorse, the customs offices were located there. Possibly to conveniently apprehend miscreant Americans trying to flee into the sanctity of Canada, the RCMP located their offices in the station as well, and backed up their regulations with a jail.

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 stone CPR divisional station (right) replaced the first station (left), which gave birth to the town of North Bay. Photo courtesy of CPR Archives, A 1120.

Size, however, had little to do with a station becoming a union station. The delightful little wooden station at Jarvis, Ontario, hosted the Great Western’s “Air Line” and Hamilton and Lake Erie railways. The Grand Trunk station in Brockville and the Canadian Northern station in Belleville both hosted CPR trains, while the Grand Trunk station in North Bay was also the home base for the Ontario government’s Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway trains. The smallest union station in Canada, however, was that on the London and Port Stanley Railway. About the size of a large outhouse, this “Union” station never served more than one railway line at a time. Rather, it was named after the nearby village of Union.

The “Grand Centrals”: Canada’s Grand Urban Stations

The most specialized stations of them all, those that occupied the top of the pyramid, were the city stations, the “Grand Centrals” of Canada. Indeed, these were cities unto themselves. In them a person could buy a newspaper, have a haircut, and then relax over a seven-course meal served on china and silverware at tables covered with linen cloths. One could spend a day in them and never see a train.

The operations here were complex. With hundreds of trains huffing in and out each day, tracks had to be allocated, baggage sorted and passengers pampered. An army of personnel, two thousand in Toronto’s Union Station alone, bustled along corridors, platforms, and secret passageways to ensure that baggage met the right train, that parcels got to the post office, and that crew members showed up on time. It was a city that never stopped.

In 1915 thirty cents bought a full meal at the Winnipeg station lunch counter. Photo courtesy of CPR Archives, A 1120.

One of the busiest organizations to inhabit the urban station was the Travellers’ Aid Society. This wonderful organization, an offspring of the YWCA and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, helped the hungry and the helpless. On one occasion, staff of the Travellers’ Aid spotted a mother with four children waiting to board a westbound train, carrying only a few loaves of bread to feed themselves. Thanks to the network of Travellers’ Aids, she was cared for throughout her journey. During the war the society helped soften the stark cultural shock suffered by arriving British war brides, and, in the years that followed, they welcomed trainloads of confused immigrants. From a wartime high of one hundred thousand travellers helped, the Travellers’ Aid was helping fewer than five thousand annually less than three decades later.

Among the swirling crowds that converged onto the train platforms were pickpockets and pimps. Young girls fleeing the dead-end monotony of rural Canada were particularly easy prey for the bordello runners. These confused newcomers were susceptible to a smiling face and soothing words that led only to a cruel life of sexual slavery. Pickpockets also found countless victims, as strange surroundings and jostling crowds distracted arriving passengers from the light fingers that dipped into their purse or pocket. But among the crowd was another army, the railway police and security staff, alert and ready to pounce.

With as many as twelve platforms to sort and shuffle trains, switching was no simple matter. In the sprawling yards around the stations, signal towers controlled the all-important shuffling of the right trains onto the right tracks. Although computer technology has greatly simplified the process, signal towers still puncture the skylines of the railway yards at Toronto’s Union Station and in west-end Montreal.

If any Canadian station has changed very little, it is the urban station. Although trains are faster and fewer, Gare Centrale in Montreal and Union Station in Toronto remain as active urban hubs, but with a few new wrinkles. The traveller may still find a meal, a shave, and reading material while electronic voices intone train departures, but they may also shop in a vast underground city of stores and then ride home on a subway, all directly from a station.

Flag Stations

If the urban terminal marked the apex of the pyramid, the flag stations were the base. Passengers travelling on lightly used branch lines, or leaving quiet country areas, were more likely to say their farewells from a flag station than from a busy operator station. Railway companies seldom spent money where it wasn’t necessary and areas that didn’t need operators didn’t get them. Because these stations lacked agents, passengers were left on their own to stop the train. To do this they waved a green-and-white flag at the approaching train.

TOP: Deep in the Rocky Mountains, vacationers wait at the Mount Robson flag station. Photo courtesy of CNR Archives, X 20165. BOTTOM: An umbrella station, which served passengers travelling the Thousand Islands Railway, has been preserved in downtown Gananoque along with the last of the railway’s motive power. Photo by author.

Many places that started with flag stations grew large enough to earn a full operator station. The Prince Edward Island Railway initially designated forty-seven of sixty-four stations as flag stations. Within a few years public pressure and increased business were strong enough to have most these upgraded. Conversely, many operator stations were downgraded to flag stations, the product of railway amalgamation and fewer trains.

Some flag stations were hardly larger than outhouses: unheated cabins with a door, bench, and window. Others had modest freight sheds attached and were heated by small stoves.

Kingston’s downtown Grand Trunk station still stands. Today it serves as a restaurant. Photo by author.

Although the small size left little room for architectural imagination, the dizzy days of station building and competition did produce a wide array of pleasing and occasionally elaborate little shelters. Some of the more unusual, and several yet survive, are the little wooden umbrella stations of the Algoma Central Railway, so-called because they consisted only of benches beneath a canopy. They were otherwise open to the elements and were built where summer tourist traffic prevailed.

The preserved Peavey Station is typical of boxcar-sized stations. Photo by author.

Among those passenger routes that wind through remote regions of Manitoba, British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec, travellers must still stand beside the simple shelter or the foundation of rubble where the operator station used to stand, and flag down the train. But, on the busiest lines, computers have replaced the little green-and white flags and alert the engineer to passenger stops ahead.

It has been easier to rescue the little flag stations from demolition. Their small size made relocating costs modest and many were hauled away behind a horse or tractor to become a storage shed on an adjacent farm. Several others ended up in local museums where Canadians can still stand and imagine a distant whistle echoing across the forest of the waving wheat fields.

Fortunately, because of their size, flag stations were fairly easy to preserve, providing of course that they survived what were often their early closings. Among countless others, such depots may yet be found in Ontario where Garnet and Moulton rest in private yards as does the delightfully named Owlseye in Alberta. Sturgeon Bay, Crombies, and Moulinette, in Ontario, and Percival, Saskatchewan, and Peavey, Alberta, form part of local museum displays.