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Rails Across the Prairies: The Rails Arrive

The Canadian Pacific Railway:

Canada’s National Dream

Having become the first prime minister of the newly created Dominion of Canada, the Tory John A. MacDonald worried about how to keep the country together. Concerns, real or not, about the Americans possibly wanting to annex Canada plagued him. The term manifest destiny had been uttered not too many years previous, and he worried, too, about the U.S. post-Civil War ambitions. And then there was the immense land mass between the settled east and the west coast that clearly had more ties to the south than to the east. In 1869 the first transcontinental railway in the U.S. had been completed, and the projected Northern Pacific route close to the border appeared poised to send branch lines northward into what were then the North West Territories. In order to entice the territory of British Columbia to join Confederation, and to secure the territories, in 1871 MacDonald promised a transcontinental railway.

Ground was broken in West Fort William in 1873, but a scandal brought down MacDonald’s government, and it was not until his re-election that the railway building began, in 1881, when the Canadian Pacific Railway Company was formed.

Until the arrival of the railways, the most direct link of the Prairies to eastern Canada involved travel by steamer up the Red River to Saint Paul, Minnesota, where travellers could connect with the Union Pacific and Central Railway.

The first line into the Prairies, however, was not the CPR, but rather the Pembina Branch, built from Emerson on the Minnesota border to St. Boniface. It would later form part of the CPR. The route had been first proposed in 1874 by Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie as an alternative to the scandal-plagued CPR backed by John A. MacDonald.

But, even before the line opened, the first steam engine arrived in Winnipeg. On October 9, 1877, the steamer Selkirk brought the Prairies’ first steam locomotive, the Countess of Dufferin, to Point Douglas in Winnipeg. Its role was to help in the construction of the Pembina Branch, and today the steam engine rests in the Winnipeg Railway Museum in that city’s Union Station.

In 1878 the last spike was driven to connect the Pembina Branch with the Saint Paul and Pacific Railroad at

Rosseau River, Minnesota. This one-hundred-kilometre branch was shortly thereafter acquired by the CPR and used to help ship in supplies necessary for the westward push of its own rail line. In December 1879, a second locomotive arrived in Winnipeg, after crossing the ice-covered Red River. This was the J.C. Haggart, which would lead the construction westward from Winnipeg the following spring.

Now in the Winnipeg Rail Museum, the Countess of Dufferin was the first steam locomotive to arrive on the prairies.

Although the CPR was originally intended to lure the colony of British Columbia into the Canadian fold and speed settlement of the Prairies, it was also a convenient way to move the military quickly to potential trouble spots in the west. Despite the benefits to Canada, it was considered by its British backers to offer a vital link between Europe and Japan and was even nicknamed the “all red route.”

After ground was broken in West Fort William (today Thunder Bay) in 1873 for the construction of the CPR, the citizens of Winnipeg realized, with concern, that the proposed route crossed the Red River well to their north, at Selkirk. Winnipeg quickly offered the CPR a generous grant of land and tax concessions if it would swing its line southward through Winnipeg. And so, in what would be a trend of accepting blatant inducements, the CPR agreed.

Because the CPR had too little capital to undertake the entire project, in 1881 the federal government passed the CPR Act, granting the railway twenty-five million dollars and twenty-five million acres of land, the sales of which would allow the CPR to raise the necessary funds. The railway then turned around and sold 2.2 million acres of that land to the Canadian North-West Land Company, with the right to buy five million more. The company proceeded to lay out townsites at intervals of twelve to fifteen kilometres — the distance that a farmer could haul a wagonload of grain in a day. Many of these sites are today’s prairie ghost towns.

Although the CPR’s original survey routed the line through the northern, more-fertile part of the Prairies, the railway opted instead to lay tracks farther south, partly in order to pre-empt incursions by American railroads.

Construction proceeded swiftly across the open prairies. At the end of rail, the work train included a pair of two-storey cars for the crew; an upper level was for sleeping, the lower for eating. Twenty flat cars held the ties and rails while inspection cars and workshops completed the consist. After the tracklayers came the station builders. The first crew erected the framing, the next did the sheeting and flooring, while the final crew finished off the plastering and painting.

It was not unusual for four or five stations to be under way at the same time. It was no surprise, then, that by 1881, trains were entering Brandon, and just two years later, Calgary. Finally, on November 1, 1885, the Prairies were linked to eastern Canada and train service between Montreal and Winnipeg began.

To further discourage American incursions, the CPR then constructed a line of its own into the U.S., namely the “Soo” line, which stretched from a point near Moose Jaw to the U.S. border at North Portal, where it linked with routes to Chicago.

Following the opening of the CPR to Port Moody and then Vancouver in 1886, rail construction in the Prairies, except for a few branch lines, slowed to a crawl. The CPR at that time suffered no real competition, creating a monopoly that left farmers paying high prices to move their wheat. Pressure mounted on Manitoba’s premier, Norquay, to provide competition by chartering new provincial railways. The MacDonald government, however, still very much in league with the CPR, disallowed any such initiative. George Stephen, president of the CPR, went even further and threatened to move the CPR shops from Winnipeg to Fort William. In response the provincial attorney threatened to subpoena Stephen along with Donald Smith, but, hidden in a CPR coach, they slipped out of the province before he could do so.

After an economic depression slowed railway construction in the early 1890s, the CPR returned to branch-line building and by 1897 had managed to lay another 3,500 kilometres of track, nearly half of it on branch lines. The province of Manitoba added another eight hundred kilometres of provincially chartered short lines. These included the Manitoba and Northwestern from Portage la Prairie to Yorkton (in what would become Saskatchewan), and the Northern Pacific and Manitoba Railway from Emerson to Winnipeg and from Morris to Brandon. Although the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal had been chartered to build from Gladstone to Sifton as early as 1889, it remained for the Canadian Northern Railway to assume control of the charter to begin construction. Within twenty years, Manitoba had tripled its trackage.

While rail lines were criss-crossing the Manitoba landscape prior to 1900, the western prairies had little to show. Although the CPR had laid tracks into Calgary by 1883, it was not until 1891 that it extended branches north to Strathcona, under the charter of the Calgary and Edmonton Railway (C&E), and south to Fort Macleod.

In 1891 the C&E arrived in South Edmonton (soon to be called Strathcona) from Calgary but remained on the south bank of the North Saskatchewan River, much to the chagrin of Edmontonians who were waiting on the north bank. But it was here that it laid out yards and built a modest wooden station. The C&E was, in reality, part of the CPR, which later built a more elaborate stone-and-brick station, still standing in historic Strathcona. It was not until 1913 that the CPR finally crossed the then-new High Level Bridge and entered Edmonton.

In 1889 the CPR extended a branch line from its main line near Medicine Hat to the coal fields near Lethbridge. Until then, the North Western Coal and Navigation Company had been barging coal from Lethbridge to the CPR at Medicine Hat, but the shallow water forced it to build a line of its own. In 1889 the CPR extended the Lethbridge line down to the American border at Coutts to link with the American railway network.

The only other line of note on the western prairies at this time was the Qu’Appelle Long Lake and Saskatchewan Railway (QLL&S), built in 1889–90 from Regina to the steamer landing on the North Saskatchewan River at Prince Albert. Although effectively owned by the CPR, it was built under a separate charter so that the QLL&S could obtain the land grants in that area. The contractors who built that line were none other than William Mackenzie and Donald Mann. Little could the CPR know that they would soon launch the line’s main railway rival — the Canadian Northern Railway.

The Canadian Northern Railway Empire of William Mackenzie and Donald Mann

Once they were finished with the QLL&S, Mackenzie and Mann began to create their own empire, which they called the Canadian Northern Railway. Together, their policy was to establish a national network by buying up unprofitable lines and unused charters, building lines as quickly and cheaply as possible to access as many areas as they could. Mann had previously acquired the charter for the Hudson Bay Railway, and as partners, he and Mackenzie began by acquiring the charters of the Winnipeg Great Northern Railway and the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company, both of which would be the beginnings of a main line that would stay to the north of the CPR. Completed in 1905, the route extended through Dauphin and North Battleford, where it kept north of the North Saskatchewan River, and then continued on to Edmonton.

Political pressure from Prince Albert would also lead to a second “main line” to that area. Although Mackenzie and Mann’s tracks reached Prince Albert from Dauphin in 1906, another decade would pass before the line from Prince Albert would join up with their first main line east of North Battleford. From North Battleford, Mackenzie and Mann had intended to build yet another line north and west to open the area north of the North Saskatchewan — an area which was already attracting large numbers of Ukrainian settlers. Construction began from North Battleford at one end and from Edmonton at the other, but the lines were still unconnected when the CNo went broke. It remained for the CNR to take over construction, although even it failed to complete the link.

During this time, the CNo concentrated on establishing a dense network of branch lines to reach as many farmers as possible. Always interested in encouraging more competition for the hated CPR, the Manitoba government leased more than 450 kilometres of track from the Northern Pacific and conveyed it to the two railway builders. Meanwhile, Robert Montgomery Horne-Payne, founder of the British Empire Trust Company, was raising money for Canadian ventures, and he awarded two hundred million dollars to Mackenzie and Mann. They promptly put it toward assembling another eight hundred kilometres of new line, much of it intruding into CPR territory. They then took over a pair of charters that allowed them to connect with Port Arthur via Minnesota. In 1908 they began work on another vital link, taking them from Saskatoon to Calgary by way of Drumheller, a route that they didn’t complete until 1914. In 1912 the CNo added yet another line to its empire by extending a resource route north from Edmonton to the Athabasca River.

By 1915, when the two empire builders had driven the last spike at Kamloops Junction, the CNo had laid more than fifteen thousand kilometres of track and created 550 new communities.

Despite this impressive feat, the financial woes that would ultimately defeat them were showing as early as 1907, when they failed to make sufficient earnings to cover their interest charges. Efforts to sell some branches to the provinces found no takers. Instead, they incorporated many of their proposed new branch lines under provincial charters, avoiding the need for federal approval. One such example was the Alberta Midland Railway (AMR), which the Alberta legislature chartered in February of 1909. The lines AMR completed were from Vegreville to Calgary and from Camrose to South Edmonton (later Strathcona), before becoming part of the CNo system.

But the CNo’s fortunes rebounded, and two years later it had extended tracks all the way to the Atlantic. However, the election of Robert Borden as prime minister in 1911 proved to be another financial setback, and the CNo sought help first from England and then the U.S. With the war then raging, Britain could no longer export capital — a similar dilemma to the one facing Americans after belatedly entering the war in 1917. In that year, the end effectively came for Mackenzie and Mann’s railway empire, when a royal commission recommended that the government assume control of the line.

The Edmonton, Yukon and Pacific Railway

Originally chartered in 1896 as the Edmonton District Railway, this line was intended to stretch to the gold fields of the Yukon. By 1898, however, no work had been done and the charter fell into the ambitious hands of Mackenzie and Mann and their growing Canadian Northern Railway Empire. They changed the name to the Edmonton, Yukon and Pacific (EY&P), whose charter allowed a route to the Pacific. Under the EY&P, the CNo finally linked Edmonton and Strathcona by constructing its line along the Mill Creek Ravine and crossing the North Saskatchewan River on the “Low Level Bridge,” which the federal government had built in 1900. In 1902 the CNo entered Edmonton, building its station below McDougall Hill. Meanwhile, the main line of the CNo arrived in Edmonton from the east in 1905, and the company built a station on 21st Street. An EY&P trestle still survives on the hiking trail that follows the rail right-of-way through the Mill Creek Ravine.

The Alberta Midland Railway

Chartered in 1909, this line runs from Vegreville to Calgary, with a short-lived “short cut” from Camrose to Edmonton. It was really an instrument of the Canadian Northern Railway, using a provincial charter to get around federal approval for its construction. In fact, once the charter was approved by Alberta, it immediately became part of the CNo. Its route took it through the coal fields of the Drumheller badlands, past the ghost town of Wayne, and along the valley of the Rosebud River and Serviceberry Creek, where sixty-two bridges were needed.

Laurier’s National Dream:

The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, Canada’s Third Transcontinental Line

Despite the building of the CPR and the CNo, prairie settlement still lagged, and the new Liberal government of Wilfrid Laurier tasked Interior Minister Clifford Sifton to encourage more immigration, largely from Britain and eastern Europe. By 1911, seven hundred thousand immigrants had been persuaded and arrived seeking the “Last Best West,” as the brochures proclaimed. It helped that, in 1905, Charles Sounder, the Dominion “cerealist,” developed a type of wheat known as Marquis wheat, which could grow in harsher climates and less-fertile soil.

Meanwhile, the Grand Trunk Railway (GTR), which dominated eastern Canada, had been casting its own eyes toward the transcontinental cash cow since 1856 and lobbied to be let in. The Laurier government agreed and granted a charter to the Grand Trunk Pacific for a national line. But the GTR was hesitant to expend the large sums needed to build a line through the harsh terrain of northern Ontario and Quebec. Indeed, with the need for a third national railway being constantly questioned, the GTR sought to instead obtain the CNo. Mackenzie and Mann, however, refused to part with their own national dream.

Finally, Laurier agreed to the third national railway. To help the GTR financially, Laurier agreed that the eastern portion of the new railway would be built by the government itself and would become known as the National Transcontinental Railway (NTR), while the western portion from Winnipeg to Prince Rupert would be the responsibility of the GTR and would be known as the Grand Trunk Pacific (GTP). The two lines would meet in Winnipeg.

But, unlike the CNo, the GTP had little interest in branch lines and instead aimed straight for the coast, ultimately reaching Prince Rupert in 1914. From Winnipeg the GTP’s alignment took it through Melville, Saskatoon, and Edmonton, although it did add branch lines to Prince Albert and through Regina to the American border.

In building the eastern portion, the National Transcontinental Railway conquered countless construction hurdles, and structural engineers consider the construction of that line the world’s greatest feat of engineering in the early twentieth century outside of the Panama Canal. Conversely, the Grand Trunk Pacific’s western segment was relatively straightforward: in 1905 the GTP turned sod in Carberry, Manitoba, and in just two years, the heavy-duty steel rails were being pounded into Saskatoon. By 1910 they were in Edmonton.

Because of the heavier steel rail, the GTP trains could haul longer and heavier loads than could the CNo, and passenger trains between Winnipeg and Edmonton beat their rivals by four hours. West of Edmonton, and into the mountains near Jasper, the CNo and GTP tracks ran parallel to each other. Finally, common sense prevailed, and in 1917 the CNo switched to the heavier GTP track, while the redundant CNo rails were sent to wartime France to replace tracks damaged by bombing.

But, unlike the CPR and the CNo, the GTP received no grants of land. Instead, it went ahead and purchased forty-five thousand acres of land for eighty-six townsites, advertising them as “towns made to order.”

As early as 1911, it was becoming painfully clear that too much track had been laid in western Canada. With costs soaring, Charles Melville Hays, president of the GTP, urged the government to take control of the line, but that initiative sank in 1912, when Hays went down with the Titanic. In fact, the government itself was urging the GTP to take over the NTR and CNo, but to no avail. Between 1900 and 1915, trackage increased by 130 percent, whereas population increased by only 40 percent. Compared to the U.S. and the U.K., Canada’s lines were the most sparsely populated, at 1.5 kilometres of track for every 250 people — a far cry from the 1.5 kilometres per four hundred people in the U.S., and 1.5 kilometres per two thousand in the U.K. Even the influential Bank of Commerce, which owned banks in many prairie towns, was calling for a national railway system for the country.

Eventually, outright fraud and shady practices had increased the cost of operating the NTR section to the point where the GTR refused to continue operating it. The need to fund the war effort meant that the many lines in the Prairies suffered in a similar fashion to route right across the country. In 1916 Prime Minister Robert Borden established a royal commission, which urged that the federal government amalgamate the GTR, GTP, CNo, NTR, and ICR. The federal government ignored a CPR plea to assimilate the lines with its own and instead created the Canadian Government Railways to operate the eastern division of the GTR as well as the failing Intercolonial Railway. In 1918 the Canadian National Railway was created to take over the operations of both the Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk Pacific Railways. Later, in 1919, the government passed the Grand Trunk Acquisition Act and the following year had control of both the GTP and GTR. The Canadian National Railway was formally born. But would it save the Prairie rail lines?

The Canadian National Railway

Under its new president, Henry W. Thornton, the Canadian National Railway could embark on new railway ventures, including restarting the moribund Hudson Bay Railway. Through the 1920s, the new CNR added branch lines and station styles of its own. It also merged the two CPR-operated lines to the Peace District. One of the CNR’s tasks at hand was to complete unfinished lines it had inherited, such as a branch the CNo had, in 1911, promised to build in order to open up the area north of the North Saskatchewan River between Edmonton and North Battleford. Under a province of Alberta charter for the “Canadian Northern Western Railway,” the CNo surveyed a northerly route from Edmonton to Saskatchewan to meet a section that had already been completed north of North Battleford to St. Walburg.

Progress on the western end had remained slow from the beginning, halting altogether with the onset of the First World War. With the return of more prosperous times in the 1920s, the CNR — now the new owner of the CNo — began work anew. While rails were extended to Grande Centre and Heinsburg, the final link to St. Walburg in Saskatchewan remained unrealized. Abandoned in the late 1990s, that portion of the old route between Waskatenau, Heinsburg, and Cold Lake later became the route of the popular Iron Horse Trail.

But the CNR fared little better than its predecessors, as traffic fell by half between 1928 and 1935. In fact, to keep up with changing transportation realities, the CNR began using trucks and joined the CPR in launching Canadian Airways Ltd. in 1930. Following the Second World War, the auto age took hold and rail traffic dwindled. To keep profitable, the CNR and CPR began to eliminate tracks and reduce service. Today, the trimmer lines still operate expansive yards and haul lengthy unit trains across the vast plains. Ironically, many of their so-called uneconomical branch lines have become profitable short lines that still link dozens of small prairie towns and the farmers who depend on them.

The Churchill train pauses at Portage la Prairie station in Manitoba.

The Hudson Bay Railway

Interest in a railway to the shores of Hudson’s Bay dates back to the early 1880s, when charters were granted to two separate companies: the Nelson Valley Railway and Transportation Company and the Winnipeg and Hudson Bay Railway and Steamship Company, which eventually merged to form the Winnipeg Great Northern Railway, later renamed the Manitoba Railway and Canal Company. This was the very charter that William Mackenzie and Donald Mann used to form the beginnings of their Canadian Northern Railway. In 1905, when the Canadian Northern Railway assumed the charter, it completed the Hudson Bay line to Hudson Bay Junction and then as far north as the Saskatchewan River at The Pas. However, it was more interested in using the charter to complete its main line to Edmonton, and it declined to carry the line farther north to the proposed terminal at Port Nelson without more funding from the government — funding that was not forthcoming.

In 1913 an exasperated federal government assumed the route, completing a bridge over the Saskatchewan River and laying track to Gillam, as well as starting work on the port facilities at Port Nelson. After being interrupted by the war, the Canadian National Railway took over and finished the line to Churchill rather than the inferior Port Nelson. In 1929 the trains started running over the eight-hundred kilometre line. Although grain shipments from this area were disappointing due to the short ice-free season, large mineral finds in the Thompson and Lynn Lake areas brought more business to the line. With prospects of global warming bringing longer ice-free seasons in the Arctic, interest in grain shipping has gained new life. As well, one of VIA Rail’s more popular rail excursions is the Churchill train, which also serves remote aboriginal communities along the way.[1]

The Northern Pacific and Manitoba Railway

By 1888 many prairie farmers and residents in general resented the CPR monopoly and clamoured for competition, but the federal government was in no mood to charter another rail-building fiasco. The provincial government in Manitoba, however, was anxious to satisfy its own constituents and had no such hesitation. It happily granted approval to the Northern Pacific and Manitoba (NP&M) to build a line south from Winnipeg to the U.S. border at Emerson, and west to Brandon.

By travelling south, passengers could transfer to the Northern Pacific Railway and voyage to the west coast, all in competition with the CPR. In Winnipeg the NP&M chose the forks of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers to build its station, engine house, and roundhouse. By 1901, however, financial woes befell the little line and it was taken over by the ambitious rail builders William McKenzie and Donald Mann, who were then cobbling together their Canadian Northern Railway network.

When the GTP and CNo built its magnificent Union Station in Winnipeg in 1911, the former NP&M station became an immigration hall. Later redesigned, the old NP&M engine house then became the Bridges and Structures Building. With the development of the Forks, it was transformed into the Manitoba Children’s Museum and forms part of the revitalization project. Adjacent to today’s children’s museum, the Johnson Terminal is the new home of what were once the GTP and the NP&M stables.

The Northern Alberta Railway

As the Peace River area began interest farmers, a rail line was needed into that northwestern area. When the Edmonton, Dunvegan and British Columbia Railway (ED&BC) was chartered in 1907, it was intended to go through Dunvegan and trace the various river valleys to Fort George, British Columbia. But, instead of reaching Dunvegan, it went as far as Spirit River and then branched off to Grande Prairie, and from there it pushed through to Dawson Creek. Shortly after the province chartered the ED&BC line, it also chartered the Alberta and Great Waterways Railway to build to the forks of the Clearwater and Athabasca Rivers — a route that was eventually completed by the ED&BC. In 1925 the town of Waterways was laid out. Today, it’s a suburb of Fort McMurray.

A former rail car sits in front of the GWWD station in St. Boniface, Manitoba.

Then, in 1913, the Alberta government chartered yet a third line, the Canada Central line, to build from near McLennan to Peace River Crossing. The three lines then worked together until financial constraints forced the government to take over all three. In 1928 the lines were taken over by the CPR and CNR, who called line the Northern Alberta Railway. In 1981 that line was assumed solely by the CNR.

In 1962 the Canadian government began constructing the Great Slave Lake Railway from Roma to Hay River on Great Slave Lake — a distance of some 520 kilometres. The Alberta Resources Railway was completed by the Alberta Government in 1969 and runs for thirty-two kilometres, from Hinton to Grande Prairie.

The Greater Winnipeg Water District Railway

The Greater Winnipeg Water District Railway (GWWD) enjoys a long and significant history in the annals of Manitoba railways. To supply water to the booming city of Winnipeg, the Government of Manitoba proposed to build an aqueduct to the parched city from Shoal Lake near the Ontario border. The GWWD railway was built in 1919 to service the aqueduct, and it still does. The 180-kilometre-long railway carried passengers — settlers in the early years and cottagers later on — and a wide range of freight including mail, milk, sand and gravel, and farm produce.

There were a small number of stations along the way, with names like Braintree, Waugh, Haddashville, and Millbrook, some of which survive in different locations. Now owned by the City of Winnipeg, the GWWD is considered to be the world’s longest industrial rail line, operating three diesels for the sole purpose of maintaining the aqueduct.

The “Rimby Line”

Occasionally, farmers had to take things into their own hands. When no railway seemed prepared to extend tracks north from Lacombe, Alberta, to Rimby, the local farmers started one of their own. Although they obtained their charter in 1909, construction did not begin until 1913, and it took another eight years, due to the intervening war, to reach Rimby. In 1922 the CPR took over the line and completed a loop through Breton, eventually reaching Leduc in 1931. There is a CPR portable station — originally located in Tees — in the Paskapoo heritage village in Rimby, and this represents the type of station that would have stood in the town. A caboose stands beside it.

Watering the West

In 1903 the Government of Canada transferred over the last of the land it had promised to the CPR. The difficulty was that much of the 1.2 million hectares lay within what early surveyor John Palliser called nothing more than an extension of the American desert, noting that it was a “region of arid plains devoid of timber or pasturage of good quality.” The region became known as the “Palliser Triangle.”

West of Calgary, the prospects seemed equally dim. Here, in 1905, the CPR created a 2.5-square-kilometre reservoir — known as Chestermere lake — on the Bow River and in 1910 established a system of secondary canals. In 1944 the area was transferred to a local farmers’ organization known as the Western Irrigation District, but the bigger challenge still lay to the east, in the Palliser Triangle.

The prospects of attracting settlement to what many perceived as a parched wasteland seemed dim, but the CPR saw potential and in 1910 launched an ambitious project to bring water to this arid prairie. At Bassano the railway constructed a massive dam and aqueduct, while south of Brooks it created Alberta’s largest man-made lake: Lake Newell, five kilometres wide and sixteen kilometres long. These projects brought water to 113,000 hectares of cropland, luring a fresh influx of farm settlers.

The Unusual Brooks Aqueduct

East of the bustling town of Brooks, Alberta, and a few kilometres south of the busy Trans-Canada Highway, stretches one the Prairies’ most unusual railway structures — the Brooks Aqueduct.

Completed in 1914, the aqueduct extended more than three kilometres from the Bassano dam, and at the time it was the largest concrete structure in the world. In all, more than three hundred labourers poured nineteen thousand cubic metres of reinforced concrete, and they even included a siphon, which carried the water under the CPR line and back up again. In operation the aqueduct could move seventy cubic metres of water per second along the 3.2-kilometre system.

Within three years, pieces of concrete were falling off. To remedy this, a material known as gunnite was added, and by 1934 rehabilitation of the aqueduct was complete. But by then, the effects of the depression were hampering the CPR’s ability to continue to operate the aqueduct, and a farmer’s cooperative was formed to operate the valuable watering system. It had, after all, turned one of the driest parts of Alberta into one of its most fertile. In 1969 the federal and provincial governments assumed operations of the Eastern Irrigation District, and upon discovering that the aqueduct was quickly deteriorating, they decided to demolish it. But the new management board for the district recognizing the heritage value of this rare structure and lobbied to retain it, fencing if off to protect the public.

The Brooks Aqueduct forms an unusual image on the landscape but was vital to irrigation in this dry corner of the prairies.

Until 1979 the aqueduct had irrigated the vast area, but finally the water trickled to a halt. Just four years later, it was declared a National Historic Site, and today it is an interpretive centre with early photographs to show this remarkable feat of construction to astonished visitors. A pathway follows the remaining portion of the aqueduct to the west, while to the east the CPR now passes through a gap in the structure.

The Bassano Dam

Equally impressive, however, is the Bassano dam, constructed to provide the water for the aqueduct. Located eight kilometres southwest of the town of Bassano, the 2,100-metre long earthen dam required 567,000 cubic metres of earth to build it. The concrete centre portion is 220 metres long. The dam was refurbished in 1984, and today is almost as popular an attraction as the aqueduct itself. The site offers a viewing point and picnic facilities.