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STATIONS AND THE CANADIAN LANDSCAPE

The Railway Towns

Canada’s most prolific town planners were the railways. The shape, the appearance, indeed, the very existence of Canadian communities during the heyday of railway construction were determined by, more than any other single factor, the location of the railway station. During the boom years before the First World War, three national railways extended their tentacles across the largely unpopulated prairies, first choosing locations for their stations and then building the communities around them. In eastern Canada stations were thrust into the heart of existing communities, altering the urban fabric around them. Towns appeared, towns disappeared, towns were changed forever, all on the whim of a station planner.

Nowhere was this more evident than in western Canada. As part of its incentive to build the railway, the CPR had received 25 million acres from the government to dispose of in whatever manner it wished. One of the most lucrative ways was to carve it up into town lots. Each township received a station and a town.

The CPR’s townsite locations were meticulously chosen and rigorously executed. Before construction began, the CPR deliberately selected a southern rather than a northern route for its main line; the northern route would have had to pass through a number of existing settlements; the southern route was largely uninhabited and gave the CPR almost absolute control over townsite selection, design, and sales.

Although Sandford Fleming, the government engineer for its portion of the CPR, had devised a standard town plan for the prairies with streets radiating from the central railway station, the CPR ignored it and designed its own standard plans. Much simpler, the railway plan consisted of a grid pattern of streets, usually on the same side of the tracks as the station. The Canadian Northern located the towns on the north side of the tracks wherever possible. This would orient the station platform toward the southern winter sunshine, a direction that not only protected passengers from the cold northern winds but also helped heat the waiting room.

Although the routes of the railway lines were well known in advance, the locations of the townsites were not. To discourage the kind of land speculation that would drive up prices for station grounds, the railways left townsite selection until the last possible moment. More often than not, the railways avoided existing settlements and selected bald prairie for their stations and towns. Here they could control the location of the station and not only avoid high land values, but own the townsites outright and reap the bonanza from the sale of the town lots.

While this had the desired effect on speculators, it also caused considerable anguish among existing communities that the railways deliberately bypassed. In choosing undeveloped land at Portage la Prairie and Brandon for stations and towns, for example, the CPR shunned the established settlement of Grand Valley, and the settlement swiftly shrank.

The original CPR divisional station in Medicine Hat was typically simple in style. Its replacement was a more elaborate hotel/station. Photo courtesy of CPR Archives, A-175.

As the CPR began to construct its southern line through Manitoba, two busy little communities, Mountain City and Nelsonville, eagerly awaited the news that they would soon boast a new station and perhaps even become a divisional point. Nelsonville, in fact, was already incorporated and had a courthouse, a land titles office, a weekly newspaper, several industries and sixty houses. But, to their shock, the CPR ignored both and located its station between them at Morden. Despite pleas from even the provincial government, the CPR was unmoved. Beaten, the merchants and residents jacked up their stores and homes and moved them to Morden. Today no trace remains of the vanished villages.

Nakina, in remote northern Ontario, was one of the more dramatic examples of a town that had to move. Shortly after the government of Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier completed the National Transcontinental across northern Ontario, a divisional town known as Grant was created. Here, the railway built a roundhouse and repair shops, as well as homes for engineers, conductors and crew. A short distance to the south lay another new transcontinental line, the Canadian Northern.

By 1923, a new Crown corporation known as the Canadian National Railway owned both. One of the CNR’s first fights was that to obtain the lucrative silk contracts from Japan. Success depended upon speed — speed to get the still-living silk to the east coast from the west before it started to deteriorate. But separate, both the former GTP and CNoR routes were too long. The CNR quickly realized that linking the two lines at their closest point, just west of Grant, would reduce the transcontinental travelling time by four hours — enough to win the coveted silk contracts.

The link was completed in 1923. The CNR then realized that its divisional point of Grant, now east of the busiest portion of the new line, was in the wrong place. At the new junction the CNR hurriedly dumped off a boxcar to serve as a station, gave it the name Thornton Junction, and prepared to move Grant to the new site.

Soon, a parade of houses and stores, balancing awkwardly on railway flatcars, began to slowly wend its way to the newly cleared townsite, now named Nakina. The townsite was a standard railway plan, a grid of streets situated north of the tracks with the main street leading straight to the station grounds. The company houses were reconstructed along the main street at the head of which a handsome divisional station replaced the boxcar. A string of false-fronted hotels and stores lined the street behind the station and gave Nakina the appearance of the boomtown that it was.

Radville’s main street with its preserved historic bank and hotel, ends at the Canadian Northern’s divisional station, now a museum. Photo by author.

Soon, the inevitable roads arrived, diesel replaced steam, and the railway pulled out. The old wooden station fell into disrepair. Now, thanks to an Ontario government grant, the station has been restored as a transportation hub, with VIA Rail’s transcontinental Canadian stopping three times weekly in each direction.

Occasionally the railways failed to dictate the shape of a town around their station. When the CPR sought to build the Crowsnest Pass line through Fort Macleod in southern Alberta, the Board of Railway Commissioners insisted that the railway build its station no farther than five hundred yards from the town limit. The railway, however, subsequently convinced the town to shuffle its boundaries so that the station still ended up about three kilometres from the commercial core and, no doubt, the more expensive land.

In 1945 a four-decade battle ended in victory for the business community of Port Moody, British Columbia, when the CPR finally hoisted its two-storey station onto flatcars and moved it from its fringe location to the heart of the community. The CPR’s crew completed the move in less than seven hours and even turned a blind eye when some of the more daring townsfolk hitched a ride on the slow-moving structure. In the late 1970s, the station was moved once again, this time to become a museum.

As in many prairie towns, the Moose Jaw station dominates the end of the main street. Photo by author.

In 1882, Lieutenant Governor Edgar Dewdney had been ordered by the federal government to find a new site for the territorial capital on the endless plains of Saskatchewan. At an insignificant siding known as “Pile O’ Bones,” Dewdney purchased land and pressed the government to place its new offices on it. Meanwhile, the CPR, in keeping with its policy of avoiding private lands, chose a station location three kilometres away. A new town began to bloom around the CPR facility and was given the name Regina. To further confound the hapless Dewdney, the CPR chose, to everyone’s surprise, not Regina, but the unlikely raw town of Moose Jaw as a new divisional point. Although Regina grew on the strength of its status as the capital and the fertility of its surrounding farmlands, it never became the railway town that Dewdney and Regina’s supporters had hoped it would.

The railways established their divisional points every 150 kilometres or so. Construction booms and soaring land values inevitably followed, and existing towns and landowners vied ferociously for the coveted stations and facilities. Fort Steele, British Columbia, began as a Royal North West Mounted Police outpost. But when the CPR began building its southern main line toward the Crowsnest Pass, rumours swept the town that the CPR had selected it for a divisional point. Instantly the town boomed and land values soared. But the CPR rejected Fort Steele and chose Cranbrook instead. The bubble burst and Fort Steele became a ghost town. It remained derelict and forgotten until 1966, when the government of British Columbia purchased most of the town and reconstructed it as a tourist attraction.

Even before the railway construction crews reached Calgary, it was already a busy trading post. However, once again, to avoid high land costs, the railway located its station more than a kilometre from the fort and its settlement. Despite the howls of protest from the business community, the CPR refused to relocate its station any closer and the unhappy merchants had little choice but to move to the station.

The railway further solidified its location by placing its warehouses at the new site, forcing other warehouse owners to follow suit. Then, in 1912, railway owners built the beautiful Palliser Hotel adjacent to the station and the shape of Calgary was forever fixed.

The CPR’s magnificent château-esque station dominated Vancouver’s growing downtown. The station lasted only eighteen years. Photo courtesy of CPR Archives, A-12537.

If the CPR’s station location had influenced the shape of Calgary, that influence was even more pronounced in Vancouver. Under its original charter the CPR was to terminate at Port Moody. Van Horne, then CPR general manager, found the harbour unnavigable and pushed the rails on to a tiny and dilapidated saw mill town named Coal Harbour where he received twenty-five hundred hectares of land from the province. Here, on long wooden piers rising awkwardly from the coastal mud flats, the CPR hastily erected an unimpressive and unadorned temporary wooden station.

The next year the CPR sent in surveyor L.A. Hamilton to lay out the usual town plan with its grid street pattern. Here, the CPR built a new station and added offices, freight facilities, and the first Hotel Vancouver. Until it was demolished in 1914, the grand chateau-esque station, which had replaced the original, visually dominated the main shopping street, Granville, as if to reaffirm that the railway was in control of the city’s destiny.

For two decades the CPR’s dominance of the West Coast remained unchallenged. Then, in 1905, a new rival, the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, proposed a brand new town for its own western terminus. On the fog-bound Pacific coast, seven hundred kilometres north of Vancouver, the British Columbia government granted the GTP ten thousand acres of land for a station and townsite. The Boston planning firm of Brett and Hall devised a model city of curving, tree-lined streets, which the railway christened “Prince Rupert.” To attract buyers the GTP widely announced that the new city would have no restrictions on the use of those lots.

In 1909 the lots went on sale. Frenzied selling and reselling pushed prices beyond $10,000 per lot. But despite the orgy of bidding, the new town remained largely empty. Most of the bidding had been by speculators, buyers who had never intended to even visit the place. When the port of Vancouver proved to be far superior for importing commercial goods, the expected freight traffic never materialized and speculators were left with worthless land.

While the CPR located and designed the townsites across the prairies, the job of selling them fell to a private consortium of British and Canadian investors known as the Canada North West Land Company. Nominally independent, the company was in effect an extension of the CPR’s land department and, in 1908, was formally taken over by the railway.

The CPR was not the only railway company in the land business. They all were. The hugely lucrative land sales were the fastest way the railways could recover their enormous construction expenditures and the most convincing argument they could place before their shareholders whenever it was time to again expand.

Unlike the CPR, William Mackenzie and Donald Mann, the precocious builders of the Canadian Northern Railways, assembled their land holdings not from the government but by purchasing existing railway charters — charters with land grants included. In less than ten years they could lay claim to more than 4.1 million acres of land, most of it prime prairie black soil. By 1906, the duo had created more than 132 villages through Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.

The latecomer was the Grand Trunk Pacific. Although it was the darling of the Laurier Liberals, who built most of the line, it received no aid. But by building through virtually virgin territory, the GTP was able to assemble eighty-six townsites at bargain prices. Each town plan was identical. In 1909 one newspaper headline read, “Towns made to order.”

“We will put a town here,” said the engineer in charge, “there was no ceremony, no one to applaud … These towns-to-be would grow up straight and orderly according to a formula, the parks labelled, the marketplace determined. The main street always runs down to the railway station, 80 inches wide and no building costing less the [sic] $1000 can be erected upon it.”

Before the town was developed, the station presented a forlorn appearance on the bare prairies. As W.W. Withrow noted in his classic Our Own Country (1888), “In some places the station house is the only building in sight. At one such place a couple of tourists came out onto the platform as the train came to a stop. ‘Which side is the town on anyhow?’ said one to the other. ‘The same side as the timber of course,’ replied the other. The point of the joke is that not a solitary tree was to be seen on either side.”

By controlling the disposition of the land in the town, the railways could control its appearance. Anxious to show to the world the commercial boom that they brought to the prairies, the railways ensured that the lots most visible from the station, along the main street that led to the station and those that paralleled the track, were all sold for commercial uses. They even endeavoured to ensure that large hotels were located conveniently just across the road from the station.

As the prairie towns grew, wooden false-fronted stores lined the wide main street that unrolled from the rear door of the station’s waiting room. The design was far from accidental. By dominating the main street, the stations would remind the residents daily of the railway company’s pre-eminence. Conversely, an arriving passenger’s first view was of a commercially prosperous main street, a deliberate orchestration by the railway companies to reinforce their own importance in the development and economy of Canada’s towns and villages. The tactic certainly impressed W.W. Withrow: “The railway stations through the province of Manitoba gave evidence of life and energy. At many of them are 2, 3 or even 4 capacious steam elevators representing rural wheat purchasing companies and frequently a number of mills … stations succeed each other at intervals of 5 or 8 miles and many of them are surrounded by bright and busy towns.”

In eastern Canada, station planners had to contend with towns that already existed. Changes to the landscape, however, were often no less spectacular than they were upon the undeveloped prairies. Factories and warehouses appeared by the track while hotels, stores, and even flower gardens clustered behind the station. More than any other building, railway stations shaped the appearance and the destiny of eastern Canada’s small towns.

An aerial view of the town of Temagami shows how the village grew around the ONR station. Photo by author.

Until 1853, when the Great Western Railway constructed a new suspension bridge across the Niagara River, the village of Elgin consisted of only a handful of cabins. The instant access provided by the bridge brought 280 town lots onto the market, ranging in price from $150 to $300. In just three years Elgin had boomed into “an enterprising, brisk and lively town with upwards of 100 inhabitants, 14 or 15 grocery stores and 20 saloons and hotels.” In 1879, the original wooden station was replaced with “a large brick structure of Victorian gingerbread and ornamental woodwork [whose] massive wood parallel entrance doors made it the envy of the frontier.” That little “frontier” village today goes by the name of Niagara Falls, and the station still stands.

The preserved station and grain elevator in Unionville, Ontario, represent a typical station landscape. Photo by author.

Not far away, a similar story was unfolding. In 1873, when the Buffalo and Lake Huron Railway replaced the ferry service across the Niagara River with a new bridge, a new town sprang up on the flat shoreline that surrounded the new station. Stores, taverns, and churches crowded the 250-lot town plot. In the words of a contemporary visitor, “Victoria, the new town, is the terminus of the Grand Trunk, the Great Western and the Canada Southern railways. It is contemplated that Victoria will become a suburb of Buffalo [which] can be reached in a few minutes. Victoria already has good hotels stores and neat cottages with unsurpassed facilities for all classes of manufacturing and mercantile businesses.”

The town became “Bridgeburg” in 1894 and then amalgamated with Fort Erie. The Grand Trunk station with its conical “witch’s hat” waiting room was demolished; however, another of the Fort Erie stations was relocated to a nearby museum.

A station located apart from an existing village created an equally indelible imprint upon Canada’s landscapes: the station village. Most were tiny satellites to the parent village and typically consisted of a hotel or two, a store, a café, and a handful of houses for railway employees.

A few station villages, however, boomed and completely overwhelmed the parent. Canterbury Station in New Brunswick was one. It developed around the station of the New Brunswick and Canada Railway, a dozen miles from the original settlement on the St. John River. Within a decade it had matched the old site in size and then, when the water-powered industries of the decaying old town became outmoded, Canterbury Station became the more important of the two.

Maynooth Station is an example of such a station location sparking a new satellite village. Photo by author.

Even more dramatic was the growth of Killaloe Station on the Ottawa, Arnprior, and Parry Sound Railway in Ontario. As early as the 1840s and 1850s, Killaloe was a small but busy mill village. However, in the 1890s, John Booth and his railway builders chose a route three kilometres north, and the station village quickly outgrew the old mill village. Today, Killaloe Station is simply called Killaloe and claims a population of over six hundred. The older village has shrunk to a tiny clutch of homes huddled around the old general store and mill.

But the impact of the railway station upon the urban landscape can just as easily be overstated, for often there was none. Along branch lines with little activity, stations were mere flag stops. Structures were little more than enclosed shelters, and, if the passengers were fortunate, equipped with a stove. More usually, however, they were unheated and about the size of an outhouse. Here the station remained alone on the landscape, often a solitary silhouette against an open sky.

Station Landscapes

Despite the different shapes that the railways created in towns east and west, the landscapes that immediately surrounded the station were more or less similar. They had to be.

Part and parcel of Canada’s station landscape were the water tanks. The steam engines’ heavy appetite for water meant that a reliable and frequent water supply was essential. The tanks themselves were steel, a bulbous barrel atop stocky legs and pipes. Throughout most of the country, however, frigid winters could freeze solid even an entire tank of water. To prevent freezing, a protective wooden shell was built around the tanks. Inside the shell a stove and pump kept the water both moving and thawed during the winter. At some eastern Ontario stations the lower section of the shell was of local stone rather than wood.

While freight stations were seldom a dominant part of the station landscape in Canada, that of the CPR in Kingston, Ontario, was unusually elaborate. Illustration courtesy of Queen’s Archives.

A rod that pierced the roof of the tank rested on a floating ball and alerted maintenance crews to the level of the water inside. In the early days of Canada’s stations, before municipal water pipes were constructed and extended to the water tanks, windmills beside the tanks pumped the water from a well into the tank. In Avonlea, Saskatchewan, water had to be piped from a lake several kilometres away.

In the early days, coal was loaded from the coal pile onto the coal tenders by a bucket or scoop on the end of a swivel. This awkward process was replaced by the coal dock or tipple. A much more efficient system, the coal was stored in an overhead bin and when the tender was underneath, the operator would simply open the chute and fill the tender. During the 1920s these dark and dusty towers became an integral part of the station landscape, particularly at divisional stations. Avonlea foreman Jack Dalrymple tried to brighten his dusty coal tower by placing geraniums in the coal dock window.

The most visible and enduring element of the prairie station landscape was the grain elevator. Prairie grain, after all, was the reason why the railways were there in the first place. To avoid the distinctive aromatic unpleasantness of having a steady stream of horse-drawn wagons lining the towns’ streets, the elevator companies located their elevators opposite the station and the town. As grain traffic increased, however, the lines of wagons grew so long that they frequently blocked the tracks and disrupted train movement. In response, the railways made land available for elevators only on the same side of the tracks as the towns and stations, but at a considerable distance from the town centres.

TOP: The water tower in Barry’s Bay, Ontario, is Ontario’s only surviving wooden water tower and sits near the former Booth Line station. Photo by author. BOTTOM: The residents in the “ghost town” of Heinsburg, Alberta, have preserved their water tower and their station. Photo by author.

The late 1990s saw the beginning of the end of the prairie grain elevator. The shift to more modern roadside grain terminals led to the mass obliteration of these iconic trackside sentinels. Only where these have been modernized, or specifically preserved, do the prairie elevators yet stand tall. Elevators in places like Nanton and Acadia Valley in Alberta, Hepburn SA and Inglis MA have become grain elevator interpretation centres, Eastern Canada too could proclaim trackside grain elevators. However, when the grain industry moved west beginning in the 1880s, most were demolished. A few gained a new existence as feed mills. Some however have been saved for their heritage value, including those in Pontypool, Port Perry and Unionville, all in Ontario.

As pioneer farmers struggled to clear the trees, the saw mill became a common sight beside most stations. But once the forests were cleared, the saw mills closed. As farming became increasingly profitable, the railways began to move farm products to market, and grain elevators, more usually associated with the prairie landscape, became a common sight in Ontario and Quebec.

Stockyards too were a common element of the station’s immediate landscape. Towns often vied vigorously with each other for a stockyard at the station. Even where cattle were not raised locally, regulations required that, while en route to market, livestock had to be off-loaded at regular intervals for exercise.

In divisional towns the landscape around the stations were heavily dominated by railway structures. Beside the station — sometimes in them — a restaurant provided meals for passengers waiting for the engine to be serviced and for the crews to change shifts. Usually the restaurants were franchised out to private operators, although sometimes they were operated by the railways themselves. At any event they provided economy-minded travellers with a less expensive alternative to the more costly dining car.

Sorting yards, roundhouses, engine sheds, and coal tipples dominated the sprawling station grounds. Behind the station, bunkhouses, hotels, or occasionally YMCAs would house train crews awaiting their return shift.

Divisional towns were home to the railway crews. To attract good workers, preferably family men, the railways provided permanent housing. Styles were often reminiscent of the stations themselves. But in all cases the houses could be readily distinguished by their rigid rows and identical designs.

An 1890s view of the station and dining hall in Broadview, Saskatchewan. Most divisional stations had restaurants either beside them or in them, offering economy-minded passengers a less expensive, if hurried, alternative to the dining car. Photo courtesy of Saskatchewan Archives Board, R-A 18910-1.

Gardens

One of the most distinctive features of Canada’s station landscapes, and one of the least remembered, were the station gardens. The early stations, with their piles of cordwood and muddy grounds, were unkempt and ugly. To soften the unsightliness, the railways began to supply agents with flowers to add to their own vegetable gardens.

Long a practice of station agents in England, the station gardens first appeared in Canada along the Grand Trunk Railway between Toronto and Montreal and along the Ontario Simcoe and Lake Huron (later the Northern) Railway between Toronto and Collingwood. The man who started it all was Fred Cumberland. An engineer from England hired by the OH and S, Cumberland was meticulous in the running of the railway. It was he who insisted that his railway have the best station gardens, and many attribute to him the initial impetus for Canada’s station gardens. Bolstered by the unexpected popularity of the gardens, Cumberland hired a gardener at Couchiching Point to set up a permanent green house. In 1868, two of the more popular station gardens, those at Sunnidale and Stayner, cost $436 and $401 respectively.

A now-forgotten feature of the station landscape was the popular station garden, as seen in this extensive garden at Chelsea, Quebec. Photo courtesy of CPR Archives, 13469.

Collingwood and Allandale, however, were the most important points on the line, and Cumberland gave them the best gardens. Within two decades of the opening of the Northern Railway, Collingwood had become an important tourist destination. Passengers disembarked here to transfer to Georgian Bay steamers. While waiting for their connections they admired the large gardens or listened to the music from its bandshell. Allandale, an important divisional point on the Northern Railway, boasted a particularly large and attractive garden. Although the fountain and the flowers have gone, a bust of Cumberland still gazes soberly from what is now a neatly trimmed parkette.

If the Northern Railway was the first to establish station gardens, the CPR was the most ambitious. Like the Northern, the CPR had an economic motive for its gardens. One of Western Canada’s pre-eminent developers, the CPR wanted to attract settlers. Promotional literature that featured a photo of a lush station garden made an otherwise arid Canadian West look more fertile than was usually the case. David Hysop, a real estate agent and claims adjuster for the railway, urged, “If you want to show how good the soil is why not have gardens at the railway stations in which flowers and vegetables can be grown?”

For his initiative, Hysop was promptly put in charge of forty-four gardens between Brandon and Golden. Even the surly and cynical CPR president, William Van Horne, caught the garden fever and declared “the station agent with a nice garden is the agent who has a clean station, has a flower in buttonhole, wears his coat, and has well-brushed boots.”

Uniformed staff stands in front of the restaurant at the Grand Trunk’s Allandale Station (now part of Barrie, Ontario). Thanks to Fred Cumberland, whose bust rests in a nearby park, the station garden movement began here. Photo courtesy of CNR Archives, 79095.

Although hugely unpopular for its monopolistic practices and its community insensitivity, the CPR gained many supporters for its gardens. Magazines such as the Canadian Horticulturist and the Canadian Municipal Journal praised the CPR for its work on station beautification. “The man who has a nice garden,” swooned the Municipal Journal, “is not the man who spends his time in the nearest saloon, nor the man who has to be discharged for beating his wife. [He is] a decent industrious man who will bring up his children to be the best kind of citizens.”

Station gardens were often a town’s only parkland and became the focus of the community. Those at Red Deer and Fort McLeod boasted a circular arrangement dominated by a bandshell or a fountain. Broadview, Regina, and Kenora also contained magnificent station gardens. By contrast, simpler gardens might only have the town name spelled out in whitewashed boulders.

To encourage agents to plant gardens, the railways set up nurseries, usually under the auspices of a Forestry Department to manage nurseries.

As shown in this 1920s view of the garden at Red Deer, Alberta, the CPR was moving into a less formal style of station garden. Photo courtesy of Archives of Alberta, A-6251.

Those of the CPR were at Wolseley (Saskatchewan), Springfield (Manitoba), Fort William, Kenora, Winnipeg, Moose Jaw, Calgary, Revelstoke, and Vancouver. The CNR administered nurseries in Winnipeg and Stratford, Ontario. The forestry departments also oversaw the design and the planting of the station grounds themselves. They established design criteria, circulated catalogues, and subjected the gardens to formal inspection. They also initiated a competition for the best garden, awarding $50 to the winner in each district or division.

The First World War brought with it a temporary lull in CPR’s garden beautification program. Hearkening to the federal government’s plea for more domestic food production, the CPR ploughed under many of the flower beds and replaced them with less attractive but more essential potatoes.

The end of the war, however, not only brought more gardens but also more bureaucracy. The CPR’s main competitors, the CNoR and the GTP, had just completed their lines when the war broke out. The crippling financial restrictions of the war drove them both into bankruptcy and the Canadian government set up the Canadian National Railway to assume these and other bankrupt lines. Anxious to capture some of the CPR’s business, the new CNR also set up a Forestry Department and launched a garden program of its own.

In an effort to stay ahead of the CNR and modernize its gardens, the CPR established a floral committee, and encouraged the agents to replace the earlier more formal gardens with a more current concept. The tradition-minded agents, however, largely ignored the new styles and kept to their familiar gardens, formal and usually fenced.

If the end of the First World War fostered station gardens, the end of the Second World War finished them. As cars replaced the passenger train, and modern technology reduced the community’s reliance upon its stations, the railways paid less and less attention to the gardens.

ABOVE: A modern municipal garden graces the landscape at VIA Rail’s Brantford, Ontario, station. Photo by author. BOTTOM: Canada’s best known railway hotel is arguably Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York built across Front Street, from the then-new Union Station. Photo by author.

Flower beds were replaced by lawns and surrounded by hardy and protective caragana hedges. Then, in response to the greater demand for parking, the lawns were in turn paved with asphalt. Finally, the stations themselves were demolished by the thousands — to be replaced by junkyards, modern office towers, or nothing. In other towns, small parks mark the former station gardens; some are dominated by war memorials. Meanwhile, among the many ghost towns of the prairies, the only evidence that there was ever a garden or even a station are the unkempt yet distinctive caragana hedges.

Hotels

But it was not just railway gardens and structures that typified the station landscape. Almost as inevitable as the flowers and the water tanks were the station hotels. Every town had one, sometimes more. Large or small, brick, stone, and wood, they could be found across the street and right behind the station.

Both hotel and station continue to cater to the public in Alexandria, Ontario. Photo by author.

In the smaller communities the hotels were typically wood and two or, at the most, three storeys high. Larger communities might warrant a hotel made of brick, perhaps with an elevator. Divisional towns could count on a string of hotels, for here travellers often spent the night while waiting for their connecting train. In the larger cities the railways themselves built large hotels, some of the most beautiful in the country. “Many of the early hotels reflect the tendency to show off the Chateau style in hotel building. One of the best examples of this style is the Canadian Northern Railway’s Chateau Laurier in Ottawa. Commissioned by the railway’s then president Charles Melville Hays, it was scheduled to open in June of 1912. That event was delayed when Hays went down on the Titanic while returning for the grand opening. The CPR’s Royal York Hotel (now part of the Fairmont chain) opened in 1927 with the final completion of Toronto’s Union Station and still retains its opulent early elegance in such rooms as the Imperial Room and Grand Ballroom.

In Thunder Bay, the Prince Arthur Hotel, although simpler in exterior design, lured tourists to what was then a remote corner of Ontario. Also in the chateau style, Saskatoon’s Bessborough Hotel (now Delta) was a relative latecomer being built by the Canadian National Railway in 1935. This followed the completion of the CPR’s Hotel Saskatchewan in Regina in 1927 when Saskatoon business groups lobbied for a grand hotel in their own community. Halifax’s Delta Nova Scotian Hotel, attached to its 1928 CN station (now occupied by VIA Rail) were necessitated by the devastating Halifax explosion of 1917.

The stunning Chateau Montebello was opened as a private retreat along the CPR’s Ottawa to Montreal line in 1930, and known as the Seigneury Club. Octagonal is shape it is considered to be Canada’s largest log structure. The CPR acquired the retreat in 1970 opening it to the public and renaming it the Chateau Montebello It is today part of the Fairmont chain of hotels.

A similar log hotel, the Minaki Lodge in northwestern Ontario, was destroyed by fire, in 2003. It had originally been built by the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway in 1914 in line with the growing trend of railways building resort hotels to attract more passengers. Following a fire in 1925, the new owner, Canadian National, rebuilt it as a luxury wilderness retreat. Between 1955 and 2003 the hotel had a series of owners. It remained closed from 1998 to 2003 when it reopened but within months it again closed and was abruptly destroyed by fire. It is now the site of a condo development.”

In places like Medicine Hat, Alberta, and Macadam, New Brunswick, hotel facilities were incorporated in the grand chateau style stations themselves. Both historic structures still survive.

Railway tourist facilities were not always large or luxurious. In 1923 the CPR supplemented its grand chateau hotels with what it called “bungalow camps.” The best preserved example lies along the French River south of Sudbury where the summer station now serves as a private residence. One of its more famous visitors was the legendary Marilyn Monroe.

The Palliser Hotel in Calgary, the Royal Alexandra in Winnipeg (demolished), and the Hotel Vancouver in the city of the same name, were all built by the CPR. The Fort Garry in Winnipeg, the Royal York in Toronto, the Château Laurier in Ottawa, and the Bessborough Hotel in Saskatoon, erected by predecessors of the CNR, are other examples of railway hotels that have achieved architectural acclaim.

The “chateau” period of station architecture greatly influenced many of these hotels such as the Fort Garry, the Chateau Laurier, and the Bessborough. In a few cases such as McAdam (New Brunswick), Medicine Hat, and the second Moose Jaw station, all chateau-esque, the railways built the hotels right in the stations themselves.

In an era when most travel was by train, hotels were essential. Travelling salesmen, entertainers, indeed any visitor, relied upon this form of accommodation. “Drummers,” as the salesmen were called, often used their hotel rooms to display their latest line of wares to prospective purchasers and encourage clients with gifts of cigars or whisky.

With the elimination of passenger service along most lines, the hotels were either demolished or converted to other uses, such as apartments, taverns, or stores. In the ghost towns of Alberta and Saskatchewan, many sit empty, paint peeling, and their shutters banging in the prairie wind.

Names

While railway companies commonly named stations after their railway executives, nearby towns or geographical features, they also employed a degree of imagination in their names. The CPR, for example, in southeastern Saskatchewan opted to name a string of stations after famous poets, Lampman, Browning, Wordsworth, Service and Parkman appeared in a line, while other stations celebrated royalty: Monarch, Empress, Duchess and Consort all showed up along what was called the “Empress” line, while a string of military names were given to Major, Ensign, Federal and Hussar.. The National Transcontinental line across northern Ontario and the prairies named stations alphabetically from east to west.

The Fort Garry Hotel in Winnipeg was one of many grand hotels built by the railways in Canada’s larger cities. Photo by author.

Such opportunities were more limited in eastern Canada where more often than not the towns existed before the rail lines arrived although Schreiber, Englehart, Hornepayne and Collingwood, all in Ontario, do reflect the names of prominent railway men. Acronyms too were common such as Canora SA, an abbreviation for the CAnadian NOrthern RAilway. The T&NO’s Swastika, Ontario, raised hackles in the lead-up to World War Two when politicians lobbied for a name change to Winston. The local populace quickly reminded the critics that they owned their name long before the Nazis appeared on the scene and that the name and symbol actually meant good luck.

Less visible, but equally as significant, was the influence that stations had upon community names. In eastern Canada, where the railways often passed near existing towns and villages, the railway companies usually named the station after the town. When the railway created a separate satellite settlement, the company simply added the word “station” to the town name. As a result, there are more than two hundred communities in eastern Canada with “station” as part of their names.

But in western Canada, where the railways created the communities, they exercised a free and often imaginative hand in the naming of their stations. Originally, stations were simply numbered, but as soon as a post office was proposed, a proper name became necessary. Although it was the practice of all railway companies to name stations after their more prominent officials, some went farther. During the First World War, employees who had been decorated for their war service were rewarded by having a station named for them. Heskith, Kirkpatrick, Thrasher, and Unwin were all named after decorated railway officials.

The Grand Trunk Pacific named their new communities alphabetically from east to west, such as Atwater to Zelona and Allan to Zunbro. Acronyms were also popular. Kenora, Ontario, was named after KEewatin (a nearby town), NOrman (the first postmaster), and RAt Portage, the community’s first name. Near the Alberta–Saskatchewan border, the rationale for the acronym “Alsask” is self-evident; not so, however, for the next station on the line, “Mantario.” Apparently the company wished to offend no one.

Humour occasionally influenced the naming of stations. To avoid duplication, the letters of a name might be reversed or rearranged. For example, Leonard became CPR’s “Draneol,” Ontario, and Sullivan became “Vinsulla.” In northern Ontario, the CPR named its station at “Bonheur” after a turn-of-the-century female French artist who wore trousers and smoked cigars. Her significance to the CPR, however, remains a mystery to this day.

Not all station names were universally accepted. When the Algoma Central Railway decided to use the Native names “Ogidaki,” “Mashkode,” and “Mekatina” for three of their stations north of Sault Ste Marie, Ontario, the Sault Star derisively remarked that the names were “devised by a Welshman who talks Russian with the Aberdeen inflection.” It added, xenophobically, that the names were “designed to keep the coming Scandinavians at home.” Nevertheless, the names were retained and remain in use.

The landscapes created by the stations are vastly different now. The wholesale station demolition of the 1960s and 1970s left a hideous hole in the heart of small-town Canada. Often in place of the sturdy stations and their gardens are vacant and weedy station grounds, dusty parking lots, or unkempt storage yards. The water tanks and the coal tipples are gone, as are most of the cattle yards and many of the grain elevators. The railway houses have been resold, re-sided, and remodelled — although the characteristic rows and shapes remain unmistakable. The satellite station settlements at the fringe of the larger towns have now been swallowed by faceless urban sprawl. On the prairies, the wide main streets that ended at the station are still lined with simple storefronts and still end at the railway track or its abandoned roadbed. But the vacant view down that street now seems strangely empty, for the heart of the community is gone. Sometimes only the name survives.

TOP: Canada’s railways offered up a variety of imaginative station names such as Owlseye, Alberta. Photo by author. BOTTOM: Swastika’s name raised hackles during the Second World War but the residents resisted a name change. Photo by author.

Ghost Towns

One of the more unusual station landscape legacies is the ghost town. Across the prairies region, the railways created towns by the thousands. Most were within a dozen kilometres of each other offering elevators, stations, water towers, hotels and retail and institutional services. By the 1960s the modernization of railways and grain shipment rendered most of these communities redundant and many became ghost towns.

Saskatoon’s Bessborough Hotel was completed by the CNR in the 1930s. Photo by author.

It is a heritage however that the few remaining residents are eager to celebrate. A few exceptions do stand out. Heinsburg in Alberta calls itself Alberta’s “liveliest” ghost town” while Rowley Alberta celebrates its ghost town status with a monthly pizza fest and nicknaming itself “Rowleywood” after various film shoots such as Bye Bye Blues, that have used its abandoned streetscape and vacant structures. As across the prairies, many Ontario ghost towns, usually former railside sawmill towns, languish in decrepitude. Nicholson, Benny and Milnet, one-time mill towns in northerneastern Ontario lie forgotten and uncelebrated. Depot Harbour on Georgian Bay, the grain terminus of J.R. Booth’s ambitious rail line, attracts visitors to its overgrown foundations and the shell of its railway roundhouse.

Ghost towns across Canada’s Prairie provinces are a result of modernized train and elevator operations. This is the main street of Heinsbur, Alberta, that province’s “liveliest ghost town.” Photo by author.