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
