Late on a hazy July day in 1994, Dr Wilf Schellenberg (my uncle) indulges my request to pose in a photo.
Eric and I had visited Wilf's home town in 1979 with our Aunt Rosemary and Uncle Wilf.
Parts of the line had been approved for abandonment in the preceding years.
Thank you to Eric Gagnon for sending this photo from that evening!
Rosemary and Dr Wilf Schellenberg, circa 1979.
Photo by Eric Gagnon
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Photos which follow below are from a visit my spouse and I made with Rosemary and Wilf in 1994.
This was a couple of weeks before the dedication of a memorial to the Helston school which Wilf had attended.
His family's farm had been nearby.
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| from: http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/sites/bertonschool.shtml |
It was nice to be able to find a photo of the school on the internet.
The history of Helston and a photo of the final physical appearance of the memorial follow.
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| from: Railroad Map of Western Canada; undated, circa 1955; Canadian Freight Association. |
Over the years, Wilf and Rosemary gave us all many, many tours of Manitoba attractions and also provided technical advice on trips Susan and I took on our own - such as a train trip to Churchill. Partly as a consequence of this royal treatment, I never had to navigate to Helston on my own and it has always been difficult for me to pinpoint the location ( ... at least before Google).
I've found an easy method (on the map above) for you to find it:
- On the map, CPR lines are red, CNR lines are blue.
- Find Portage la Prairie.
- Working your way west from Portage, locate the first station where a blue CNR line branches into two lines (at Muir, Manitoba).
- Helston is the next station west of Muir.
You can see how interlaced the rival railway lines were, back when grain was often drawn to the nearest elevator by horses.
With the march of technology - all-weather roads, trucks which could carry large loads of grain, larger computer-automated elevators and grain cars of much higher capacity - some of these lines and elevators became less economically viable.
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Below, on a railway territory map from 1915, you would find Helston (Berton)
between Neepawa Jct (Muir) and Carberry Jct.
This is in Canadian Northern Railway (light green) territory
Before the creation of Canadian National Railways,
you can see the Grand Trunk Pacific main line territory (pink),
competing with the Canadian Northern and Canadian Pacific (grey).
This summer, I was able to bring together several documents originally from Wilf and Rosemary which document the history of Helston.
Lansdowne was the name of a rural municipality and extracts from this local history book provide much of the detail.
The ballpoint handwriting of LC Gagnon (Rosemary's brother) often appears in the top right corner of the documents.
Official postal records for the Helston post office appear next:
Here are some historical details of the school's development:
Above and below, you can see the current Google Earth views of the former railway line as seen from Helston. The elevator is just to the west of 72 Rd W and you can spot it as it casts a long shadow to the north.
Above: We're looking east to the railway junction at Muir with the elevator almost right below us.
Below: We're looking west with the elevator across the road from the Helston label. The line curves to Lobbville and then follows a roadbed with many curves to avoid bodies of water and to maintain a fairly level operating profile. The branch connects with another line at Carberry Junction (map pin). Also notice the location (at the right margin) of the key railway operating point at Neepawa - north of Carberry Junction.
A larger version of the 1950s map is repeated below for your convenience and pleasure.
Below, is a (winter) public timetable from 1956-57.
Train 47 operated on Wednesday and Friday between Winnipeg and Russell, Manitoba.
(Russell is a CNR/CPR junction point at the northwest corner of the map above.)
Train 48 operated Thursday and Saturday between Russell and Winnipeg.
In both cases, these trains took about 10 hours to cover 224 miles.
Mixed train 517 was scheduled on Friday, operating between Portage and Dauphin.
Mixed train 518 was scheduled Saturday, operating between Dauphin and Portage.
(westbound after Helston, head north at Carberry Jct ... Neepawa ... McCreary ... Dauphin)
As a generalization, these engine and train crews would probably operate west on their regular train assignments,
before returning east on the 'opposite number' of the following day.
It has always been a source of wonder to me how Canadian railways in the steam age co-ordinated all their crews, equipment, coal and water as they provided service to all those prairie branch lines.
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| from: Canadian National Railways public timetable. Effective 30 September 1956 to 27 April 1957. |
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| Reference marks from the timetable above. |
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Below is a summer employee timetable for the following year - 1958.
Trains 47 and 48 are operating on the same days as above.
The mixed trains (517/518) are not shown on the employee timetable.
The Helston history above mentions the postmaster meeting the train. As the postal service adopted the use of trucks to transport sacks of mail in the 1950s, the loss of the mail subsidy often gave the railways the financial justification needed for authorization to cancel passenger service along some low traffic lines.
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Returning to our brief visit in July 1994.
We were reaching the elevator for photos over what was probably private property at the time.
Above, the elevator appears out of the mists of time on this warm summer evening.
The former road bed would have been quite close to the camera's right.
A nice railway tie fencepost.
Above: The south side of the elevator.
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Here is a 'primary historical document' !
However, I have made the leaflet cover and interior into a single image.
Wilf and Rosemary were at the cairn dedication ceremony where this program was handed out.
Rosemary made contemporaneous notes on the program.
(Trivia: 'Bear Creek' also appears in an exclamatory sentence in the script of the movie Dr Strangelove.)
In the newspaper account below, you can see the final appearance of the stone cairn which was shown with Wilf in the first photo.
To understand how mail was delivered to Berton/Helston by Railway Post Office (RPO),
click on the link below.