lacked agents, passengers were left on their own to stop the train. To do this they waved a green-and-white flag at the approaching train.
TOP: Deep in the Rocky Mountains, vacationers wait at the Mount Robson flag station. Photo courtesy of CNR Archives, X 20165. BOTTOM: An umbrella station, which served passengers travelling the Thousand Islands Railway, has been preserved in downtown Gananoque along with the last of the railway’s motive power. Photo by author.
Many places that started with flag stations grew large enough to earn a full operator station. The Prince Edward Island Railway initially designated forty-seven of sixty-four stations as flag stations. Within a few years public pressure and increased business were strong enough to have most these upgraded. Conversely, many operator stations were downgraded to flag stations, the product of railway amalgamation and fewer trains.
Some flag stations were hardly larger than outhouses: unheated cabins with a door, bench, and window. Others had modest freight sheds attached and were heated by small stoves.
Kingston’s downtown Grand Trunk station still stands. Today it serves as a restaurant. Photo by author.
Although the small size left little room for architectural imagination, the dizzy days of station building and competition did produce a wide array of pleasing and occasionally elaborate little shelters. Some of the more unusual, and several yet survive, are the little wooden umbrella stations of the Algoma Central Railway, so-called because they consisted only of benches beneath a canopy. They were otherwise open to the elements and were built where summer tourist traffic prevailed.
The preserved Peavey Station is typical of boxcar-sized stations. Photo by author.
Among those passenger routes that wind through remote regions of Manitoba, British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec, travellers must still stand beside the simple shelter or the foundation of rubble where the operator station used to stand, and flag down the train. But, on the busiest lines, computers have replaced the little green-and white flags and alert the engineer to passenger stops ahead.
It has been easier to rescue the little flag stations from demolition. Their small size made relocating costs modest and many were hauled away behind a horse or tractor to become a storage shed on an adjacent farm. Several others ended up in local museums where Canadians can still stand and imagine a distant whistle echoing across the forest of the waving wheat fields.
Fortunately, because of their size, flag stations were fairly easy to preserve, providing of course that they survived what were often their early closings. Among countless others, such depots may yet be found in Ontario where Garnet and Moulton rest in private yards as does the delightfully named Owlseye in Alberta. Sturgeon Bay, Crombies, and Moulinette, in Ontario, and Percival, Saskatchewan, and Peavey, Alberta, form part of local museum displays.
Millet, Alberta, displays a typical station landscape. Photo courtesy of Archives of Alberta, B-A 487.
2
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
