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
