Rails Across the Prairies. Ron Brown
CNR fared little better than its predecessors, as traffic fell by half between 1928 and 1935. In fact, to keep up with changing transportation realities, the CNR began using trucks and joined the CPR in launching Canadian Airways Ltd. in 1930. Following the Second World War, the auto age took hold and rail traffic dwindled. To keep profitable, the CNR and CPR began to eliminate tracks and reduce service. Today, the trimmer lines still operate expansive yards and haul lengthy unit trains across the vast plains. Ironically, many of their so-called uneconomical branch lines have become profitable short lines that still link dozens of small prairie towns and the farmers who depend on them.
The Churchill train pauses at Portage la Prairie station in Manitoba.
The Hudson Bay Railway
Interest in a railway to the shores of Hudson’s Bay dates back to the early 1880s, when charters were granted to two separate companies: the Nelson Valley Railway and Transportation Company and the Winnipeg and Hudson Bay Railway and Steamship Company, which eventually merged to form the Winnipeg Great Northern Railway, later renamed the Manitoba Railway and Canal Company. This was the very charter that William Mackenzie and Donald Mann used to form the beginnings of their Canadian Northern Railway. In 1905, when the Canadian Northern Railway assumed the charter, it completed the Hudson Bay line to Hudson Bay Junction and then as far north as the Saskatchewan River at The Pas. However, it was more interested in using the charter to complete its main line to Edmonton, and it declined to carry the line farther north to the proposed terminal at Port Nelson without more funding from the government — funding that was not forthcoming.
In 1913 an exasperated federal government assumed the route, completing a bridge over the Saskatchewan River and laying track to Gillam, as well as starting work on the port facilities at Port Nelson. After being interrupted by the war, the Canadian National Railway took over and finished the line to Churchill rather than the inferior Port Nelson. In 1929 the trains started running over the eight-hundred kilometre line. Although grain shipments from this area were disappointing due to the short ice-free season, large mineral finds in the Thompson and Lynn Lake areas brought more business to the line. With prospects of global warming bringing longer ice-free seasons in the Arctic, interest in grain shipping has gained new life. As well, one of VIA Rail’s more popular rail excursions is the Churchill train, which also serves remote aboriginal communities along the way.[1]
The Northern Pacific and Manitoba Railway
By 1888 many prairie farmers and residents in general resented the CPR monopoly and clamoured for competition, but the federal government was in no mood to charter another rail-building fiasco. The provincial government in Manitoba, however, was anxious to satisfy its own constituents and had no such hesitation. It happily granted approval to the Northern Pacific and Manitoba (NP&M) to build a line south from Winnipeg to the U.S. border at Emerson, and west to Brandon.
By travelling south, passengers could transfer to the Northern Pacific Railway and voyage to the west coast, all in competition with the CPR. In Winnipeg the NP&M chose the forks of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers to build its station, engine house, and roundhouse. By 1901, however, financial woes befell the little line and it was taken over by the ambitious rail builders William McKenzie and Donald Mann, who were then cobbling together their Canadian Northern Railway network.
When the GTP and CNo built its magnificent Union Station in Winnipeg in 1911, the former NP&M station became an immigration hall. Later redesigned, the old NP&M engine house then became the Bridges and Structures Building. With the development of the Forks, it was transformed into the Manitoba Children’s Museum and forms part of the revitalization project. Adjacent to today’s children’s museum, the Johnson Terminal is the new home of what were once the GTP and the NP&M stables.
The Northern Alberta Railway
As the Peace River area began interest farmers, a rail line was needed into that northwestern area. When the Edmonton, Dunvegan and British Columbia Railway (ED&BC) was chartered in 1907, it was intended to go through Dunvegan and trace the various river valleys to Fort George, British Columbia. But, instead of reaching Dunvegan, it went as far as Spirit River and then branched off to Grande Prairie, and from there it pushed through to Dawson Creek. Shortly after the province chartered the ED&BC line, it also chartered the Alberta and Great Waterways Railway to build to the forks of the Clearwater and Athabasca Rivers — a route that was eventually completed by the ED&BC. In 1925 the town of Waterways was laid out. Today, it’s a suburb of Fort McMurray.
A former rail car sits in front of the GWWD station in St. Boniface, Manitoba.
Then, in 1913, the Alberta government chartered yet a third line, the Canada Central line, to build from near McLennan to Peace River Crossing. The three lines then worked together until financial constraints forced the government to take over all three. In 1928 the lines were taken over by the CPR and CNR, who called line the Northern Alberta Railway. In 1981 that line was assumed solely by the CNR.
In 1962 the Canadian government began constructing the Great Slave Lake Railway from Roma to Hay River on Great Slave Lake — a distance of some 520 kilometres. The Alberta Resources Railway was completed by the Alberta Government in 1969 and runs for thirty-two kilometres, from Hinton to Grande Prairie.
The Greater Winnipeg Water District Railway
The Greater Winnipeg Water District Railway (GWWD) enjoys a long and significant history in the annals of Manitoba railways. To supply water to the booming city of Winnipeg, the Government of Manitoba proposed to build an aqueduct to the parched city from Shoal Lake near the Ontario border. The GWWD railway was built in 1919 to service the aqueduct, and it still does. The 180-kilometre-long railway carried passengers — settlers in the early years and cottagers later on — and a wide range of freight including mail, milk, sand and gravel, and farm produce.
There were a small number of stations along the way, with names like Braintree, Waugh, Haddashville, and Millbrook, some of which survive in different locations. Now owned by the City of Winnipeg, the GWWD is considered to be the world’s longest industrial rail line, operating three diesels for the sole purpose of maintaining the aqueduct.
The “Rimby Line”
Occasionally, farmers had to take things into their own hands. When no railway seemed prepared to extend tracks north from Lacombe, Alberta, to Rimby, the local farmers started one of their own. Although they obtained their charter in 1909, construction did not begin until 1913, and it took another eight years, due to the intervening war, to reach Rimby. In 1922 the CPR took over the line and completed a loop through Breton, eventually reaching Leduc in 1931. There is a CPR portable station — originally located in Tees — in the Paskapoo heritage village in Rimby, and this represents the type of station that would have stood in the town. A caboose stands beside it.
Watering the West
In 1903 the Government of Canada transferred over the last of the land it had promised to the CPR. The difficulty was that much of the 1.2 million hectares lay within what early surveyor John Palliser called nothing more than an extension of the American desert, noting that it was a “region of arid plains devoid of timber or pasturage of good quality.” The region became known as the “Palliser Triangle.”
West of Calgary, the prospects seemed equally dim. Here, in 1905, the CPR created a 2.5-square-kilometre reservoir — known as Chestermere lake — on the Bow River and in 1910 established a system of secondary canals. In 1944 the area was transferred to a local farmers’ organization known as the Western Irrigation District, but the bigger challenge still lay to the east, in the Palliser Triangle.
The prospects of attracting settlement to what many perceived as a parched wasteland seemed dim, but the CPR saw potential and in 1910 launched an ambitious project to bring water to this arid prairie. At Bassano the railway constructed a massive dam and aqueduct, while south of Brooks it created Alberta’s largest man-made lake: Lake Newell, five kilometres wide and sixteen kilometres long. These projects brought