Turcot Yard - Newspaper Clippings Bracketing Its Half Century

Jim Christie found the first newspaper clipping from 1908 about Turcot Yard when the roundhouse was just a year or so old. I have added the clippings kept on file by LC Gagnon regarding the end of Turcot Yard.

Considering the Turcot closing clippings as 'artifacts' you can see that official sources guided some of the content of the articles. Non-railroaders of the day had some familiarity with steam locomotive technology and they could describe the engines' appearance while operating with some accuracy.

Today people use smartphone cameras as they strive to create beautiful images (not necessarily 'documenting reality') using apps which can filter out undesired people and objects. Social media approval is often important to these photographers. Traditional newspaper photographers had different things to worry about ... documenting reality and meeting deadlines.

Newspaper photographers worked to create large black and white negatives. 'First, get the negative right!' Labouring without drones, or even the primitive biplanes of the era, photographers of railways could sometimes invent their own 'bird's eye view' by hiking up from Turcot's artificial plain to Upper Lachine Road (first image). Another climbed up on a trackside structure - to obtain the second image. 

After developing the film in the darkroom, lit with extremely dim red light which wouldn't spoil the exposed film, necessary but limited manual work was done by experienced photo artists to bring out the details of key features or people. Time was limited to prepare the photos in the hours between the printing of daily (or more frequent) newspaper editions. 

How were these images rendered? Dithered black ink on dull-white newsprint was the creative medium for the finished image. This was the forerunner of today's digital coloured pixels which can produce a standard 16,777,216 colours - while we can perceive only about 1,000,000.

As scanned, showing dithering.

To use a professional photography term ... I have 'fiddled' with the newspaper photographs. I have often blurred the coarse dithering to produce objects with continuous lines ... and then sharpened the slightly-blurred images. 

In 1962, everyone had seen an 'old steamer' so there was little artistic demand to bring out details in the photos of discarded engines which were ready for scrapping ... which the railway had inconsiderately painted black in their entirety and covered with black coal dust and soot. Similarly, daylight could only light up a limited area of the cavernous, empty roundhouse stalls. So I've tried to bring out as many historical details as possible in these photos.

The 'Fond Memories' article mentions Operation Canadian National Weekend. This was held on the July 23, 24 weekend in 1962. My father and I attended the Whale Yard static displays on the Saturday. We rode the doubleheader to Garneau on the Sunday. Coloured slides and black and white prints were made of those trips and they may yet appear in another post.

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from: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. Researched by Jim Christie.

from: Canada Handbook, circa 1942, LC Gagnon files.

CNR official photo - see credit below.

'This photo can be nicer ... so let's airbrush that loafing hostler out of the 6205 and get rid of those two baggage cars up in Glen Yard!'

This may be from a series of posed CNR publicity photos taken with all available engines fired-up and partly outside their stalls. Once on the roundhouse roof, the photographer could simply walk around to capture different angles of the scene. 

As generalizations ...

I think it would be unusual to have this many engines dispatched for trains and competing for the turntable at the same time. If you look at the smokejack locations in the other images, you could infer that engines would normally advance into the stalls. Often this would be done using the latent steam in their boilers after dropping (or just cleaning) their fires at the ashpit - which was located away from the roundhouse. Depending on many variables, an engine's servicing would take 2 to 6 hours. 

After servicing, their fires would be restarted (or unbanked and stoked) to build up steam pressure - with their stacks under the smokejacks and blowers operating to draft the fires. Then they'd back onto the turntable. However, you'll also notice a few smaller smokejacks at the turntable end of the stalls. 

To manage the turntable/roundhouse congestion ... when ready, the steam locomotives would be run by shop hostlers out of the circular roundhouse area, to designated 'ready tracks'. Crews of regular runs would often find their power conveniently sequenced so they could just perform their necessary preparation and checks, and depart for their trains.

While the image above is deliberately impressive, it is probably not documenting the exact reality of what a busy day looked like ... One would just see a semi-circle of tender ends and none of the actual skilled work and dirty brute force labour being conducted within the relative darkness of the roundhouse. References suggest that Turcot was the busiest roundhouse on the CNR system and it often serviced and dispatched 100-130 engines per day.

The slow process of starting a coal-fired steam locomotive fire can be seen at time 23:43 in the NFB film, End of the Line.

End of the Line, NFB

Reverse side of the photo above.

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... probably 'assistant to the general foreman of motive power'.