Rails Across the Prairies. Ron Brown

      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.