P.O. Box 142, Big Valley, Alberta T0J 0G0
Dominion of Canada
Phone: (403) 876-2242
| Canadian Northern Society
P.O. Box 142, Big Valley, Alberta T0J 0G0 Dominion of Canada Phone: (403) 876-2242 |
Help us deal with rising heating costs-your Canadian Northern Society membership is extremely important this year! A reminder that all 2001 memberships are now due. Membership dues remain $20 for full members and $10 for associate members. Remit your dues to the Treasurer, Canadian Northern Society, PO Box 142, Big Valley T0J 0G0, or to any Society officer. Please renew—we need your continued support!
The society received a gift of 45 Ted Xaras painted railway-themed collector’s plates for display from Mr. Ray Taylor of Bashaw. This collection includes scenes of Canadian and North American railway operations and historical scenes. The collection is valued at over $5000. The plan is to place them in the tea room at Camrose. We thank Les Kozma, Finn Didrichsen, and Shawn Smith for their cash donations they made to the society along with their membership renewals.
90 years ago on January 5, 1911 the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway completed a new railway depot just west of downtown in Camrose, Alberta.
In the last Chronicle we listed and acknowledged volunteers for 2000 at Big Valley, Meeting Creek, and in overall society administration. We also had tremendous support during the past year in Camrose, and the society wishes to recognize the following people:
Thank you to all.
1836-03 Incorporation by the Legislature of New Brunswick of the St. Andrews and Quebec Rail Road Company to build from St. Andrews to Lower Canada. This is the oldest charter of a Canadian Pacific constituent. Operation was not commenced until spring 1851.
1836-07-21 Champlain and St. Lawrence Railroad opened. This was Canada’s first public railroad. The inaugural train was pulled by the locomotive Dorchester. In 1857 the Champlain and St. Lawrence became part of the Montreal and Champlain Railroad which was leased to the Grand Trunk in 1864 and now forms part of the Canadian National system.
The Canadian Northern Society’s annual pot-luck supper banquet will be held in Big Valley on Saturday, February 24, at 17:30 (cocktails), 18:30 (dinner). All are welcome.
Please RSVP to Fran Stuber +1 403 876 2349 or Glenys Smith +1 780 672 3099 by February 20, so that we can get a number and organize dishes.
We will have our traditional annual review and report of the society’s activities, introduce new members, and generally enjoy the fellowship offered. See you there!
by Ron Bailey
The afternoon of August 7, 1993, found me standing on the platform of an eighty-year-old station at Big Valley, Alberta. Built in 1912 by the Canadian Northern Railway when Big Valley was a thriving divisional point, it has now been beautifully restored to its original condition.
I had been invited by the Canadian Northern Historical Society to deliver an address to their annual Dominion Day meeting. My audience would consist of some 250 souls who would arrive from Stettler that afternoon on a steam excursion train operated by "Alberta Prairie Steam Tours" running on an abandoned CN branch line.
As the warm August sun beat down upon my shoulders, I was reflecting on the remarks I was about to give and the fact that my youngest grandson had recently helped me blow out the candles on my sixty-ninth birthday. I came to the sobering realization that the time remaining in my allotted "three score years and ten" was diminishing at an alarming rate. Standing on the station platform, my eyes searching the far horizon for a tell-tale sign of smoke from a steam locomotive, only seemed to amplify the passing years and the subject I was about to address.
The tourist train chugged into Big Valley in due course and my audience detrained on the station platform. Time for me to begin.
Ladies and Gentlemen—It was with some trepidation that I accepted the invitation to share with you a retrospective of growing up on the prairies as the son of a Canadian Northern locomotive engineer during the Great Depression.
With two sons of my own I am aware that raising a family in this day and age is a hazardous undertaking at best. My hope is that one day they will reflect on their old dad with the same regard that I have had for mine.
To set the stage for this dissertation I would like to share with you the prologue to a novel by James McCague written some years ago about the Indiana Valley Railroad, affectionately referred to as the Big Ivy. McCague’s opening words seem to capture in terms more eloquent than I am able, the environment in which I grew up.
The cemetery at East Bend, Indiana—the old part, with its rows of pitted slab headstones staggering tiredly out of line, defaced by time and desecrated by generations of birds—lies in a jog of the Hickory River, and the Big Ivy right of way crosses the trestle there and runs alongside.
It used to be that whenever an old mainline hogger was laid away, they’d time the ceremony so that the Ivy Flyer or the Fast Mail would whistle a requiem in passing. He’d be getting a wheel on his train and the smoke-stack would lay a rolling pall of smoke across the land. The long moaning of the whistle and the rolling rumble of steel on steel would drown out the minister’s last few words. The mourners would be reminded then that their departing brother was one who had regularly, through most of the days of his life, lived on terms of easy intimacy with danger surrounded by the thrashing pound of iron, massively fashioned, breathing live steam, hurtling across the miles at his command faster than lesser men ever went their whole lives long.
It set him somehow apart. The machine age brought few enough heroes, and he was one, and if he had too often partaken of the fiery waters at Fallon’s Saloon, to the detriment of his family’s happiness and the public peace. If his conversation had been studded with casual blasphemies, his will had been stubborn beyond belief, and his temper habitually carried a short fuse. Well, what did all that amount to, against the fact that he had been a man among men.
And among the male mourners, as the train rolled swiftly into the distance, there’d be a small co-ordinated movement of biscuit thick watches coming out of pockets, of callused thumbs wiping across crystals, of bare heads nodding in satisfaction as eyes met with the murmured thought. "Gettin’ out right on time."
The scene portrayed by author McCague describes almost exactly the old cemetery beside the rail line in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where one William R. Bailey is laid away.
Bill Bailey was born in 1890 on a farm near Belmont, Manitoba. That year a Northern Pacific branch line was under construction from Morris to Brandon. The rail line was surveyed through a corner of the Bailey farm, so young Bailey was exposed to railroading at an early age. Canadian Northern took over the line from the NP in 1904, and by 1909 my dad had decided to abandon life on the farm. An older sister had married a section foreman on a recently constructed Canadian Northern branch line at Wakopa, Manitoba. Wakopa was the end of steel, and the way freight and extra trains tied up there. An engine watchman was required and young Bill, who could board with his sister in the section house, applied for and got the job.
About this time the Great Northern Railway in the U.S. was making incursions into Canada. A branch line was being constructed from Devils Lake, Minnesota, to Brandon. A railway diamond crossing and an interlocking tower was installed west of the Wakopa station and the engine watchman doubled as the towerman during the day. Despite his demanding duties, Bill managed to meet and court a prospective school teacher, the daughter of a local farmer. She eventually became my mother.
Bill Bailey qualified as a fireman in 1911 and as an engineman in 1913. Engineers were precluded from active service during the war years as Canadian Northern was hard pressed to keep up with wartime demands and a burgeoning construction schedule.
Mother and dad were married in 1919. They took their honeymoon trip to Vancouver on Canadian Northern’s Confederation Limited.
The old adage "Go west, young man" certainly applied in 1919. My mother was raised in an abstemious family and since Saskatoon was founded as a temperance colony it seemed like a good place to settle. I’m not too certain it had the desired result as far as her offspring were concerned.
I arrived on April 21, 1924, born in a modest bungalow with a midwife presiding. Our house was strategically located on the street railway line that led to Nutana yard. We did not have an automobile or a telephone in those days and call boys in the crew office were still in vogue.
By 1929 the telephone had arrived, and my first recollections of railway life began with a call from the crew clerk in the middle of the night for dad to take an extra west to Kindersley or the midnight mail to Regina. I would wait until the sound of his footsteps disappeared in the snow on the back porch and I would sneak in and occupy the warm spot he had vacated in bed beside my mother.
There were no radios or TVs in those days but we did have a wind-up Victrola gramophone. Dad had an affinity for railroad songs and I suspect I was weaned to the strains of Jimmy Rogers singing, "All around a water tank / standin’ in the rain / a thousand miles away from home / just waiting for a train."
Vernon Dalhart and Carson Robinson were the most prolific railroad singers of the day. It was intriguing a few years ago to visit the site where Steve Broady and "Old 97" left the rails on the trestle over Cherrystone Creek near Danville Tennessee. Sixty years previous I had worn out Vernon Dalhart’s recording of the incident.
In addition to railroad music my dad had a keen appreciation of verse. He could recite Keats, Shelly, Tennyson and Kipling ad infinitum. I often wondered about this in as much as he had little formal education. I discovered his old Grade Four Alexandra reader in the basement one day. I then learned that they taught a lot more in grade four in 1900 than they do today. Another favourite poet of Dad’s was J.C. Stead, who compiled a volume in 1912 titled Songs of the Prairie. One of Stead’s poems, "A Prairie Heroine," became so implanted in my memory through countless repetition that it was instrumental in my pursuing a career in civil engineering.
One day when I was about six years old I heard my mother and father engaged in furtive conversation. The Great Depression had descended on the prairies. My dad had been cut off the spare board in Saskatoon. He packed a much larger suitcase than usual and kissed my mother goodbye.
Thereafter in the months and years to follow, the postman would deliver a succession of letters from such places as Rainy River, Brandon, Dauphin, Kamsack, Humboldt, Regina, and North Battleford. Some of these letters would contain a cheque, which Mother would rush over to the store to pay on our accumulating grocery bill.
During the summer months when I was on vacation from school, Mother would pack our bags and we too would embark on an odyssey that would include all those points previously mentioned.
We rode the day coaches and the way cars of assorted locals and passenger trains across the prairie to spend as much time with the old man as possible. Whenever I could I would accompany him on the locomotive, leaving Mother at the hotel. The recollections of those Canadian Northern divisional points are indelibly etched in my memory.
One such summer there was a flurry of activity in Radville, Saskatchewan, a minor Canadian Northern divisional point similar to Big Valley. As I recall, the old station at Radville was identical to the one at which we are gathered. Radville was located at the hub of four subdivisions. The Avonlea from Moose Jaw came down from the northwest and continued on through Radville southeast as the Lampman Subdivision. The Weyburn Subdivision arrived from the northeast and the Bengough Subdivision ran west to Willow Bunch.
There was a lot of activity, short-lived as it was in Radville that summer. In fact it is hard to imagine there were once thirty-five crews set up on the spare board. The discovery of crude in Alberta had resulted in an oil movement down through Hanna, Dunblane, Moose Jaw to Radville and on through Lampman to Northgate en route to U.S. refineries. In addition there was a flurry of ranching west of Willow Bunch where the remnants of the old King ranch were fattening stock on the lush prairie grass. A stockman’s sleeper was set off No. 5 at Maryfield once a week and made its way down to Willow Bunch and return on a local passenger train.
The Carlton Subdivision, an obscure 35 mi (56 km) branch line ran northwest from Dalmeny near Saskatoon. During the 1930s there was freight service only as and when required, which wasn’t often. A light little Mogul locomotive, No. 414, was usually assigned to this run. After years of roaming around the prairies, cut back to a fireman’s position, my dad got called one day to take a Carlton Subdivision extra as the engineer. He took me with him and planted me on the jump seat ahead of the fireman. My dad was on the right-hand seat box and I couldn’t have been more proud if he were the king of England. The light 56 lb/yd (28 kg/m) rail lay somewhere beneath a sea of prairie grass across the right of way. As we made our way along about 10 mi/h (16 km/h), the pilot of the 414 created a bow wave like the Mauritania in the North Atlantic.
The rest of Ron’s reminiscences will appear in the next edition of the Chronicle.
1851-07-31 The 1676 mm gauge, broad gauge, is adopted as the standard gauge for Ontario and Quebec. The broad gauge was used until about 1870 after which time there was a gradual change to the now standard 1435 mm gauge.
1871-07-12 North America’s first public narrow gauge railway, the Toronto and Nipissing, is opened for traffic between Toronto and Uxbridge. The 1067 mm gauge line was converted to standard by 1884.
1871-07-20 British Columbia is admitted to the Dominion of Canada. One of the conditions of entry is that the Dominion Government should, within two years from the date of union, commence the construction of a railway from the Pacific towards the Rocky Mountains and from a point east of the Rocky Mountains towards the Pacific to connect the seaboard of British Columbia with the railway system of Canada.
1876-07-01 Through rail travel between Halifax, Québec, and the rest of the Canadian rail system is made possible.
1886-06 Contracts are let for the construction of the Chignecto Marine Transport Railway, a 27 km railway to carry ships across the Chignecto Isthmus between Tidnish on Northumberland Strait and Fort Lawrence on the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. Work on this double-track, standard-gauge railway, conceived by New Brunswick engineer Henry George Cloppers Ketchum, commenced in 1887 but was abandoned, three-quarters completed, when the funds ran out in the summer of 1891.