Rails Across the Prairies Ron Brown The Railway Heritage of Canada’s Prairie Provinces Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter One - Rails Across the Prairies: The Rails Arrive Chapter Two - The Towns Chapter Three - The Stations Chapter Four - The Castles of the Lines: The Railway Hotels Chapter Five - The Fall of the Prairie Sentinels: The End of the Grain Elevators Chapter Six - The Houses of Steam: The Railway Roundhouses Chapter Seven - Watering the Steam Engines: The Water Towers Chapter Eight - Bridging the Prairies: The Railway Bridges Chapter Nine - The Short Lines Chapter Ten - Celebrating the Heritage Notes Bibliography Acknowledgements How wonderful it was to travel across the Prairies and meet so many individuals and organizations who were concerned about their railway heritage. There were travel staff, hotel staff, museum curators, and simply those individuals who were passionate about their railway roots. In no particular order, I would like to thank the curator of the station museum in Radville, Judy Dionne, who spent her valuable time showing me the wonderful work the local volunteers have done to preserve their station on site, and who forwarded to me some interesting old images of the station. Then there was Denis Depres of the Delta Bessborough Hotel in Saskatoon, who gave me the grand tour of a grand building, and Don McGuire, who led the creation of the Wainwright Rail Park, preserving much valuable rolling stack. Thanks to Barb Monroe, communications specialist at the Heritage Park Historical Village in Calgary, for providing much-needed images of their rail operations, and to Catriona Hill, director of the CPR’s Heritage Services in Calgary, for also sharing some great shots of their heritage railway equipment, steam engine 2816, and the glamorous Royal Canadian Pacific tour train. Michelle Grenier of Hudson Bay was also kind enough to send images of the heritage station in Al Mazur Memorial Heritage Park. Thanks, too, to Malcolm Andrew of VIA Rail Canada for the image of Edmonton’s elegant and modern new VIA Rail station there. I am grateful to Andy and Michelle of the Rochfort Bridge Trading Post, who provided vital details of the massive railway trestle in that village, and Laurie Armstrong, director of economic development and tourism in Hanna, for updates on the relocation of the station and progress of the efforts to save that community’s rare roundhouse. Finally, I am most grateful to the friendly and helpful staff at Travel Alberta and Tourism Saskatchewan for generously assisting me with the logistics of my visits to those two provinces during the summer of 2011 (one of the wettest in years). I hope this modest book will confirm to these people that their assistance has been worth it. Introduction There is no other part of our country that has been so utterly dependent upon the railway for its development than Canada’s prairie provinces. Most of the towns and villages in eastern Canada were there long before the rails arrived, in some cases more than a century before. While the arrival of the railways may have helped shape the growth of these towns and villages, those in the Prairies owed their very existence to it. The railways determined where the towns would go and how they would look. Railway planners laid out the streets and decided how each area would be used. Architects like R.B. Pratt, the Maxwell brothers, and Edward Colonna created stations that were often elegant — even grand — but in almost every case dominated the urban landscape. Railways were the lifeblood of nearly every town and village, with grain shipping forming the basis of the towns’ economies. Divisional points established by the railways for their yards, engine maintenance, and crew layovers led to large towns, while major terminals created the prairie’s largest cities. Prairie residents who care about their local heritage must look to the railway and recognize, preserve, and celebrate its vestiges: the stations, the grain elevators, the water towers, the massive bridges, and the hotels. Regrettably, local indifference and even hostility to these reminders has trumped the efforts of those who cherish and attempt to save them. This book is an attempt to bring attention to the few survivors of that heritage. Many bridges yet loom high about the wide prairie valleys; stations have been lovingly restored and converted to new uses, often museums. Grain elevators have become interpretive centres, and a handful of water towers yet remain; even a few of the many prairie ghost towns proudly proclaim their status. Railway museums have assembled large collections of the coaches and engines that brought the daily arrivals to the settlements. Steam excursions relive the sights and sounds and experiences of those historic times, although VIA Rail Canada remains the only living descendant of that legacy. There are challenges, still. The demise of the Wheat Board threatens short lines, the few villages which yet depend upon their local grain elevators, and even the livelihoods of farmers themselves. Local attitudes may doom still more historic structures. Arson has cost the Prairies its most historic grain elevator, in Fleming, Saskatchewan, and a water tower in Glenborough, Manitoba. Yet, the desire to preserve and celebrate the history of a region that the railways largely created is growing. This book hopefully will be part of that celebration. Chapter One 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 NorthWest 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