It seems unfortunate that the rare and unusual so often receive the attention of railway preservationists - and the common and typical are lost.
Nonetheless, ignoring my own lamentation, here is the story of a line which existed for fewer than 20 years as it was conceived by one of the great railway tycoons.
In the 1980s, I heard an engineer say he had switched a car into the 'Old Great Northern' at Portage la Prairie. I've always been curious where that was. Back then, I mistakenly assumed it was in the Canadian Northern section of the railway yard area. An image which Eric discovered and good old Google Earth helped me answer the question for myself.
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| from: History of Railroads in America; Oliver Jensen; 1993; American Heritage Books. |
Above: James J Hill in 1909, unknown location.
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| from: The Railway Builders; Oscar D Skelton; 1916; Glasgow Brook & Co. edg |
Here are a few samplings of contemporary railway news.
As it says above, the Midland & Manitoba was Hill's company.
The Grand Trunk Pacific was also enjoying some 'earned media' as it gave the Canadian Northern a poke.
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Railroad Gazette 1905 11 10 - archive.org
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 from: The Railroad Gazette, November 1907; archive.org |
The article in the Railroad Gazette was very long and was full of boring financial details. It was fine for James Hill and the Great Northern to be this ambitious, to rattle the cages of the CPR and CNoR, and to gallantly and publicly eschew 'spoon-feeding'. However, when reading the excerpt above ...
It is not obvious why the existing Canadian railway rates westbound from the Canadian Lakehead should be particularly cheap ... when compared to the rates via the Hill lines from Duluth. Manitobans had already learned the hard way (after the Battle of Fort Whyte) that eastbound grain was carried cheaper in Canada than in the US.
So exactly why was Hill working so hard at building extra branch lines? So he could lose money by cutting his US rates ... as he tried to compete with established Canadian railways with lower rates?
Hill must have had some kind of genius 4-dimensional chess 'reason'. Or, perhaps he was just enjoying 'the game' he was playing with Van Horne, Shaughnessy et al - as a Canadian Rail article suggested. Life is short, enjoy it by keeping the other tycoons guessing.
- Hill was working to siphon off profitable near-border Canadian shipments with his many north-south branches across the west.
- Hill was threatening the CPR with the possibility of another southern Canadian transcontinental.
- Hill was even musing about building a line to Fort Churchill. Perhaps this was a swipe at the former Winnipeg & Hudson Bay of the 1880s, by then a charter in the Canadian Northern portfolio. But ... laying rails to Hudson Bay, or even just as far as The Pas, was never something which Mackenzie and Mann saw as a spectacularly profitable venture.
Perhaps if Hill had lived a little longer, he could have experienced delight
as he threatened the Grand Trunk Pacific's pipedream of building a railway line to the Yukon.
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| https://natural-resources.canada.ca/earth-sciences/geography/atlas-canada/explore-our-maps/map-archives/16868 * * Time travellers from the future - this URL worked way back in 2023. Here are possible search terms if the URL does not work. 'Natural Resources Canada' 'The Atlas of Canada's Map Archives' |
Above (1906) and below (1915) are pages from Government of Canada atlases - available at the URL quoted above. These are great atlases to look through.
You can see how the strategic picture changed for the Canadian Northern builders over the course of a decade. Where's the harm in a little more ruinous competition between tycoons when the Prime Minister is paying for everything?
Carman, Manitoba was quite a railway centre! The CPR build a branch there in 1885 and was followed by the Canadian Northern and the Great Northern.
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How does all of this relate to railway lines at Portage la Prairie?
Where was the Great Northern Railway in Portage?
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| from: Scarborough's Map of Manitoba, 1918 https://www.flickr.com/people/manitobamaps/ |
The map above is made busy (and handy) as it shows the surveyed square miles which are part of surveyed 'townships' - the latter being 6 square miles in size. You can see part of the township numbering system printed above and below the US border. A square is 640 acres and a 'quarter section' is 160 acres.
The map above will relate to the Google image below.
Above: The Great Northern line leaving Portage in a south-east direction passes just east of a distinctive large bend in the Assiniboine River before it reaches the station 'Dunn'.
Below: The large bend in the Assiniboine River has turned into an 'oxbow' (the one in the lower right corner) which has become subject to eutrophication or perhaps it has been filled in with earth. Where the Great Northern Railway was you will now find Angle Road which deadends at the Assiniboine River - in the lower right corner of the image.
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Above: We've swung around and we are looking south-east from Portage, at Angle Road, and the embankment continuation south of the Assiniboine River.
The lightened rectangle near the horizon contains a little pink Google map pin at Carman.
Above: Returning to Portage to show north at the top of the image again, Angle Road comes in at the lower right corner. The Great Northern shared the new Grand Trunk Pacific station which you can barely see in the top left corner. This long rectangular building, surrounded by windbreaks, is the current 'beside the CNR ex-station building', to be exact. It was referred to as a 'union' station, because both Great Northern and Grand Trunk Pacific shared the facility.
(Whether it was the Grand Trunk Pacific ... or Portage boosters ... claiming a 'union' station in Portage, I don't know. I can't see the GTP diluting their British-American grandeur by going halfsies with Hill's dinky little line. But that ship will soon hit an iceberg, as many of you already know.)
A century after the Great Northern line into Portage was abandoned (in 1926) the former railway land use is still echoed in the land use and zoning. Above, to the west of the railway area you generally find residences. On the north-east side of the line's gentle curve to line up with today's CNR ... you can still see industrial use of the land.
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| Portage la Prairie fire insurance map 1959 from: https://www.flickr.com/people/manitobamaps/ |
About 30 years after the Great Northern left Portage, it is possible that some of the former Great Northern real estate is being used by McCall Frontenac and North Star Oil and their siding. With a wooden raised platform around the union station, the Great Northern passenger trains probably discharged passengers on the south side ... while the Grand Trunk Pacific trains used the north side. Unfortunately, these fire insurance maps do not show all of the railway buildings and facilities at Portage.
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| Portage la Prairie image from 1908. archive.org |
Above and below are south-facing images which show the relative positions
of the Canadian Northern, Grand Trunk Pacific and Great Northern in Portage la Prairie.
The image above comes from a 1908 Portage-boosting booklet which will appear in Part 7.
The image below is one of my favourite postcards because it was the first image I ever saw which showed some of the history of these lines in Portage.
I think the well-treed street to the right is 1st Street NW.
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| Unused, undated postcard. |
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Here is the legislative chain which enabled some of Hill's railway activities in Manitoba.
I think item 1913-782 would include the four railways' joint use of Winnipeg Union Station.
(Counting the National Transcontinental and the Grand Trunk Pacific as 'two'.)
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| from: A Statutory History of Railways in Canada 1836-1986; Dorman & Stoltz; 1986; Canadian Institute of Guided Ground Transport. Note: The charter of the Brandon, Saskatchewan and Hudson's Bay indicated it would build to The Pas. |
To summarize the abandonment of the Great Northern line to Portage:
- Portage la Prairie to Carman was abandoned in 1926.
- As noted above: Carman to Plum Coulee was turned over to the CPR in 1926.
- Plum Coulee to Gretna was abandoned in 1926.
- The CPR abandoned Carman to Plum Coulee in the 1970s.
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The following data is for the Portage, Morden and Brandon lines and comes from 1915.
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| from: Altitudes of Canada; 1915; James White; Commission of Conservation, Canada. |
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From November 1920, this handy pocket-sized reference shows the mixed train schedule.
James J Hill died in 1916, so his 'vision' for this particular line had probably been altered.
If one was not in a hurry, the 7-hour northbound running time of the mixed train would have been quite pleasant on a nice summer day. Except for the presence of freight cars, wayside switching work and the fact that only a single coach was probably employed, the experience and equipment might have been quite similar to an excursion on the Prairie Dog Central.