Many years ago, my father (LC Gagnon) received a couple of artifacts from my maternal grandmother because he was 'interested in trains' and, of course, he had been employed by the Canadian Pacific Railway.
First, here is the nominal roll of personnel in the Canadian Overseas Railway Construction Corps.
If you are not acquainted with the work they did, here are a couple of photos as a quick introduction.
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| from: The Railway Contractors; Geoffrey W Taylor; 1988; Moriss Publishing. |
The Canadian railway boom exhausted itself as the Great War began. Few countries had as many workers with so much knowledge and experience building railways through irregular muskeg 'wasteland' as Canada.
By 1914, the 'old style' warfare of parade-square engagements on European battlefields was dead. The glamour of the cavalry performing reconnaissance ... or chasing down routed infantry with sabres drawn, was gone. Instead, for the immediate future, draft horses and mules would be needed to pull artillery and other loads where roads or tramways could be maintained ... and to prepare the way for the iron horse.
For battlefield killing using vast quantities of artillery shells and other mass-produced armaments, the combatants would need industrialized transportation.
Canadians, and slightly-Canadianized immigrants from the British Isles (see the roll below), would be filling the demand for more and more railways. All these railways eventually reached a human-made wasteland - which was produced at great cost and known as The Front.
From past experience, I believe you can find this and other similar documents at archive.org
The Canadian Government's microfilm records are digitized and searchable there.
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In the late stages of emptying our parents' house, I encountered a deep, safe corner behind shelves and filing cabinets where large, scrolled items were kept. There they slept under at least 10 years of dust and cobwebs because other events had demanded the attention of their owner.
... Entire forests had been harvested to produce all the Masonic and Shrine scrolls awarded to my paternal grandfather (a school teacher and principal) and his father (an Anglican minister).
Another rolled-up item seemed to have been through a war or two. It was an university course design project in railway civil engineering. Perhaps it was the equivalent of an assignment in 2023 to design a large, integrated wired-wireless network for a given purpose ... in other words, a good representation of the technology and design norms of the era.
I find it interesting as an artifact because it represents a piece of tangible geography, which would be the workplace of hundreds of people, employing thousands of pieces of railway equipment, in a bygone era.
Since finding this plan, I have always wanted to reproduce it on-line so that it will be more likely to survive outside of a dusty, hidden corner. However, I was at a loss as to how to produce a 'scanned quality' image without actually scanning it.
... Fortunately, more powerful laptops with solid state drives ... and some recent difficult experiences with a scanner and image software ... finally made this project conceivable.
The treated paper is about 6.5 feet long by 2 feet, and my scanner has a working area of about 8.5 by 11.5 inches so I had to unscroll/scroll and scan it in 3 courses from side to side. I didn't want to risk damaging the artifact so it was not always possible to get perfect contact with the scanner's glass. The images I have produced are not beautiful, but you will be able to 'read' the plan and understand the logic employed by the designer over 108 years ago.
The image above and the history below come from:
The Park Family of Stewartstown, County Tyrone, Ireland & Their Descendents, Volume 3; Jean Isabelle Parke Lee; 1996; self-published.
... My maternal aunt was a formidable researcher and database compiler - as illustrated by this genealogical work.
... and now you know as much about my maternal grandfather as I do.
In our family ... or in larger family gatherings with my grandmother, or my aunt's family ... he wasn't spoken about very much.
In her later years, my mother did say that she and her father would sometimes walk north into the woods - starting from their home in east-end Lachine, where they lived at that point. However, to my mother's regret, this natural area was soon taken over by 'the railway'.
... I now conclude that she was referring to the CPR, as it built its new St Luc yard. Thinking of this Divisional Yard plan ... I wonder ... if it was perhaps this new railway development - and not nature - which attracted my grandfather's expeditions to this area.
For my mother, a striking feature along this nature walk was 'the dead horse'. How many dead equines had a Great War battlefield veteran seen in four years?
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A straight photograph of the Divisional Yard plan appears below. Toonies hold it flat. The floor divisions are about 6 inches.
The yard itself is appears as black and red. There are three large areas (black ink) which elaborate on segments of the yard.
Below: To make the design easier to see as you run your equipment through the yard from left to right, and vice versa, I have rotated the yard (red and black) so its main axis is horizontal. The black ink elaborations are itemized below in separate images.
You can see that the eastbound workflow travels along the south side of the yard ... while westbound workflow travels along the north side.
Scales and interlocking towers mark the locations of two gravity classification humps. At the bottom of the humps are found the eastbound and westbound classification yards. A complete track profile for the humps is also presented at these two locations.
... As this yard was designed in 1915, I assume that these are relatively 'short, shallow' humps because yardmen with clubs would be riding the cars/cuts ... and winding on the roof-mounted handbrakes to avoid hard collisions with the standing cars - many of which would still be made of wood. This would also be before the era of roller bearings on freight cars. Steeper humps with human- or computer-actuated mechanical retarders became standard in Canada several decades later.
To quibble: I don't see a caboose track identified anywhere. We could tuck them in by extending those two leads south of the coaling tower. And considering the engine crews - it would have been efficient, but not necessarily quiet for sleeping, to have their bunkhouse so near the roundhouse. But perhaps after working for half a day, exposed to the elements aboard a deafening and lurching steam locomotive ... one had little trouble getting to sleep after booking in.
Within the main yard plan you can see dashed lines outlining the 'cut out' areas for elaboration in black ink.
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The black ink details ...
Detail 1 ... East main switch.
Detail 2 ... West end of Eastbound Classification Yard - south of roundhouse.
Detail 3 ... Switch and tracks by coal/sand.
One wonders how different 22-year-old J Scott Parke's life would have been if the Great War had not intervened and he had completed his professional training.
