Rails Over the Mountains: Exploring the Railway Heritage of Canada's Western Mountains

By Ron Brown

Journey through the engineering marvels, stations, and heritage sites of Canada’s western mountains.

Ride the rails through Canada’s western mountains to explore the many vestiges of the region’s spectacular and surprising railway heritage. Here is where grand railway hotels were built to attract tourists to the West’s beautiful scenery and bring profit to the railway lines as well. Rustic stations added to the allure. The challenges of conquering the mountains resulted in some of Canada’s most ingenious feats of engineering, such as spiral tunnels and soaring trestles (one of which was featured in The Amazing Race Canada).

Relive the days of rail on a steam train, the luxurious Rocky Mountaineer, or one of VIA Rail’s mountain journeys. Outdoor enthusiasts can follow the abandoned roadbeds of Canada’s more spectacular rail trails, like the legendary Kettle Valley Railway. Also included are some of Canada’s most extensive railway museums, which have helped to bring this vanished era back to life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Jul 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781459733572

Ron Brown

Ron Brown, a geographer and travel writer, has authored more than twenty books, including Canada’s World Wonders and The Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. A past chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada and a current member of the East York Historical Society, he gives lectures and conducts tours along Ontario’s back roads. Ron lives in Toronto.

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Introduction

This volume completes my cross-country odyssey along Canada’s rail lines, both past and present. * Our railway history began in Nova Scotia with the coal mines of Cape Breton and the railways that served them. The journey continued with the tracks into the growing colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario, and Quebec. Companies like the Grand Trunk and the Intercolonial Railways provided the key routes, while local lines served as branches. Then came John A. Macdonald, with his grand national dream of linking the new country from coast to coast with a rail line. The completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in 1885 opened up vast stretches of the Prairies and breached the mountain barriers of western Alberta and British Columbia.

The greatest challenge that confronted the builders of these lines was how to breach the mountain barriers that loomed above them at the western end of the Prairies. Passes had to be found, tunnels and bridges built, town sites located, and workers transported and lodged.

In the following decades, those labourers would build two more transcontinental rail lines in addition to the Canadian Pacific Railway, namely, the Canadian Northern Railway (CNoR) and the Grand Trunk Pacific (GTP)/National Transcontinental Railway (NTR). As the tracks unrolled, more lines entered Canada’s resource-rich regions of northern Quebec, northern Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta. American rivals slipped in from across the border.

With the tracks in place, grand stations appeared in towns and cities. As with the classical temples in the Roman and Greek cities that inspired them, their arches and pillars signalled to arriving and departing travellers alike that the stations were the grand entranceways to urban Canada. The CPR and CNoR stations in Vancouver exemplify this approach. The railways wanted it known what their status was, and so they built grand temples to demonstrate that to the people.

Much of Canada’s heritage legacy has evolved around the railways and their effect on the landscape. Wonderful chateau-style hotels rose in the mountains and cities. Stations often mimicked that architectural style as well, as shown in the old CPR station in New Westminster, B.C. Rustic stations of log reflected the natural attractions of the mountains.

Most stations, however, were purely functional. Appearing at fifteen-kilometre intervals along the lines, they offered ticketing, freight shipment, and a wire-news service to the local communities. Water towers for the boilers in the steam engines usually appeared at alternate station sites. Station agents found living space in the stations themselves, whether in second-floor living quarters, or simply in an apartment tucked into a rooftop dormer. Divisional points at 150-kilometre intervals supplied the railway with their operational needs, such as bunkhouses for train crews, larger homes for management, roundhouses, sorting yards, as well as coaling and sanding facilities.

Even during the Great Depression, railways retained their essential role. Everything went by rail … livestock, grain, farm products, coal, logs, and most minerals. Since air travel was still in its infancy, the railways continued to carry travellers to school, to lakeside retreats, and even to world-renowned tourist destinations, in particular the much-promoted Rocky Mountains.

While the needs of carrying military personnel during the Second World War handed the railways their greatest-ever passenger loads, trouble was on the horizon. With the end of the bloodshed and the bombing, a new era was dawning: the Auto Age. Families began to acquire cars and, increasingly, they found more convenient ways to get around. No more freezing on a windy platform. Highways improved. Trucks took over from freight trains. Buses replaced tramcars, and diesel-powered locomotives replaced steam locomotives. Stations closed and were demolished, as were the water towers that stood near them. Divisional points were eliminated. Roundhouses and coal docks disappeared from the railway landscapes. Crew quarters required more modern and efficient conveniences, and so new facilities were built to replace the drafty old wooden bunkhouses.

Local freight service gave way to kilometre-long unit trains, while short-sighted governments eliminated vital passenger services. Tracks were lifted, leaving bare gravel roadbeds, many of which disappeared into the hands of adjacent property owners.

Had Canada’s railway legacy ended?

In the early 1980s, thanks to an ill-advised public relations fiasco with the CPR, Canadians awakened to the plight of that heritage. In 1982, the CPR clandestinely destroyed the much-loved West Toronto CPR station. The outrage that followed led to the creation of a unique piece of federal legislation known as the Heritage Railway Stations Protection Act (the HRSPA). Passed in a rare unanimous vote in the House of Commons, the law has allowed the minister of the environment to designate and protect important railway stations across the country. Many of those saved have become restaurants, bars, and offices. Others have become railway museums.

But much of the railway landscape remained unprotected. Of the more than one hundred roundhouses that actually survived dieselization in western Canada, nearly all were removed. Their purpose-built form and distant locations in the rail yards often made repurposing them unfeasible. Water towers and coal docks had no future either and could not be saved.

Still, Canadians were becoming increasingly aware of a legacy they were on the verge of losing. Endangered stations were relocated to become museums. Railway enthusiasts began assembling rolling stock, saving it from the scrapyard. In many cases, the old railway hotels were renovated, with their rail roots in mind. In fact, some of North America’s grandest hotels, the Banff Springs, the Chateau Lake Louise, the Hotel Vancouver, and the Empress Hotel in Victoria all reflect their deep railway roots. Tour trains began to retrace the routes of the early railway journeys.

Looking back today, Canada can be proud of the railway legacy that many have worked hard to retain. And throughout the mountains of western Canada that work is readily evident.

Rail museums in Squamish, Revelstoke, Prince George, and Cranbrook vie with the best on the continent. VIA Rail, the Rocky Mountaineer, and the Royal Canadian Pacific offer spectacular journeys through spectacular scenery. Local tour trains have kept alive the steam train era in places like Summerland, B.C., Fort Steele, Alberta, and Port Alberni on Vancouver Island. Historic wooden trestles and dark tunnels are protected in places like the Othello Tunnels near Hope, B.C., the Myra Canyon Trestles near Kelowna, and the Kinsol Trestle near Duncan, B.C.

Countless books and websites also keep alive the railway era and tell of an undying love in Canada for what is one of the country’s most important legacies.

The Canadian Railway Hall of Fame

Unlike the North America Railway Hall of Fame, which is situated in the grand old Canada Southern Railway station in St. Thomas, ON, (Canada’s railway city), the Canadian Railway Hall of Fame is strictly web-based. This ensures its accessibility to everyone with a computer, regardless of where they live. Inaugurated in 2002, the virtual museum features categories such as Leaders, Heroes, Communities, and Technology. And western Canada’s mountains play a prominent role in the hall.

The website’s first inductees included, Sir William Cornelius Van Horne, George Stephen (aka Lord Mount Stephen), and Donald Smith (aka Lord Strathcona), builders of the CPR; Sir William Mackenzie and Sir Donald Mann, who cobbled together the Canadian Northern Railway; James J. Hill of the Great Northern Railway; and Charles Melville Hays who promoted the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. All were pre-eminent in the creation of the railway network that crossed Canada’s western mountains. The western Canadian communities inducted into the hall include Banff, Alberta, Revelstoke, B.C., and Craigellachie, B.C., the site of the famous CPR Last Spike. Engineering accomplishments celebrated in the hall include the Myra Canyon Trestles and the Mount Macdonald Tunnel. According to the hall’s website (railfame.ca), any individual or organization may nominate an inductee.

This book, as with the others in the series, offers readers an opportunity to relive the railway roots of Canada’s western mountains. The sites listed are all accessible to the public (unless otherwise stated), and directions to them are included. The interested reader will need little more than a provincial highway map or, better still, a road atlas. Google maps and Google StreetView are useful references as well. The Bibliography lists books and websites that I have sourced, and which complement and enlarge on the material in the book. Many link to local history sites, museum sites, and government heritage sites.

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* Beginning with Rails to the Atlantic, Rails Across Ontario, and Rails Across the Prairies.

1

The Rails Arrive

While the CPR’s national dream has become a legend in book and song, Canada, in fact, saw the fulfillment of three national dreams. The first, of course, was that of the CPR. As part of its agreement with the colony of British Columbia to enter Confederation, the Government of Canada chartered the Canadian Pacific Railway to construct a rail line from the east to the coast of British Columbia. Train travel along the new line began in 1886. Some two decades later, the Canadian Northern Railway began operation. For this, the railway building duo of William Mackenzie and Donald Mann, later knighted, cobbled together a trans-Canada rail network from Nova Scotia to Vancouver. A short while later, Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier decided that Canada needed a third rail line, the Grand Trunk Pacific.

Each of these faced the same huge hurdles. After pushing the tracks across the comparatively easy-to-overcome terrain of the Canadian Prairies, the railway builders came up against the mountains of the West. First came the Rocky Mountains, then came the Purcells, then the Columbia Mountains, with the Selkirk and all of its other ranges, including the Monashee Mountains; then there followed the Thompson Plateau and the Cascade Mountains; and after all that, there was the Coast Range. Between all of these hurdles were a series of river valleys oriented in a north-south direction. In order to keep the track gradients manageable, the rail lines tended to closely follow these valleys. But that often meant that the routes were circuitous, and even then had to cross steep canyons or tunnel through the mountains themselves. By the time the flurry of track laying finally ended, Canada found itself with three main lines through the mountains, and connecting links, as well as some U.S.-based intruders from across the border.

The Railway Builders

William Cornelius Van Horne

Born in 1843, Van Horne cut his railway teeth working in the telegraph office of the Illinois Central Railroad in Joliet. He worked his way up to ticket agent and then in 1872 became divisional superintendent on the Chicago & Alton Railroad. In 1880 he met James J. Hill, who had signed a contract with the Canadian government to build a rail line across the country to be known as the Canadian Pacific Railway. He recommended that Van Horne be hired to manage the line’s construction. Van Horne was always out front with his comments, promising that he could build the prairie portion of the railway within a single year, 1882, which he did. Following the driving of the last spike in 1885, Van Horne became the CPR’s general manager.

One of his key decisions during construction was to redirect the line’s route from the Yellowhead Pass farther north to the Kicking Horse Pass in the southern Rockies. Here he again encountered Hill, who was promoting the incursion of his Northern Pacific Railway into southern British Columbia and Alberta. To counter the incursion from his old friend, in 1896 Van Horne secured funding from the government to build a southern main line through the Crowsnest Pass in southern Alberta.

Along his main line, Van Horne put his savvy to work by sending simple station plans, later nicknamed the Van Hornes, to local contractors to get the line running as quickly as possible. He also promoted the scenic Rocky Mountains as a tourist attraction by ordering the building of glamorous hotels and dining stations. To ensure this scenery would remain unspoiled, he convinced the Canadian government to enact laws to create national parks at Yoho and Banff.

Following the completion of the CPR, Van Horne spread his talents to resource development and to railway building in Cuba. His legacy lives on not just in the story of the CPR but in the preservation of two of his grand properties, a house in Montreal and an ocean-side retreat in New Brunswick known as Ministers Island. Van Horne died in 1915 and was buried back home in Joliet.

Charles Melville Hays

Born in 1856 in Illinois, Hays, like Van Horne, got an early start in the railway business, beginning at age seventeen in the ticket office of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad. By 1887, he was the general manager of the Wabash Western Railway. In 1896 he moved to Montreal, and by 1909 was president of the Grand Trunk Railway. He went on to promote the development of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway (GTP), a route from Winnipeg to Prince Rupert that would link up with the government’s National Transcontinental Railway. Later, after travelling to England to secure funding for the GTP, he perished on the return journey on the ill-fated Titanic.

Despite Hays’s efforts, the rail line lacked the financial resources to overcome the needs, both material and financial, of the First World War, and the GTP was assumed by the newly created government railway, the Canadian National Railway. His legacy lives on in such hotels as the Chateau Laurier and in the name of Melville, SK, a key GTP town on the Prairies.

William Mackenzie and Donald Mann:

The CNoR’s Dynamic Duo

William Mackenzie, raised in Kirkfield, ON, joined his brothers’ contracting company and was soon supplying timber to a variety of Ontario rail lines. With the start of the CPR construction, Mackenzie was hired to supply timber for the construction of trestles and stations for that national enterprise. In 1879, his future partner, Donald Mann, left the Methodist ministry to enter the lumber business. He was put in charge of barging the West’s first steam locomotive to Winnipeg and soon began working for the CPR. Here, his grading and earth-moving contracts soon put him in touch with William Mackenzie. The two joined forces and began to make a name for themselves as railway builders.

In 1897, they launched their unparalleled railway- building empire when they acquired the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company, then bankrupt. In 1899, they formed the Canadian Northern Railway and began buying up bankrupt lines or unused charters, and soon began to cobble together a nation-wide rail network. In 1905, they began to expand westward, reaching Edmonton in 1910. In 1911, they acquired a townsite at Port Mann on the B.C. coast, where they proposed to locate their car shops. But with land values in decline, they instead joined their railway with B.C.’s Great Northern Railway and so extended the line directly to Vancouver instead. There they built one of western Canada’s finest neo-classical stations.

Sadly, by 1915, with the First World War taking up virtually all of the government’s financing, Mackenzie and Mann had overextended themselves and the line was bankrupt. Like the GTP, it would become part of the new Canadian National Railway. While Mackenzie’s home still stands in Kirkfield, ON, that of Donald Mann, a mansion named Fallingbrook was destroyed by fire. Only the gatehouse still stands, on Toronto’s Kingston Road east of Fallingbrook Avenue.

Andrew McCulloch: The KVR Wonder

After graduating with a business degree in Kingston, ON, in 1888, McCulloch moved west to work on the Great Northern Railway. After a career that included work on a variety of rail lines, such as the GTP, the Columbia & Western (C&W), and the Kaslo and Slocan railways, he was appointed chief engineer by the CPR in 1910 to solve the challenges facing the construction of the Kettle Valley Railway.

The most daunting of these were the Myra and Coquihalla canyons. The