CPR 1909 Brakes on the Big Hill, Part 2 - Freight Trains

Canadian Northern yard, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, mailed 1917.

The postcard view above was probably taken sometime shortly after 1900 and hand-coloured. A passenger train is arriving at the station. The railway is not the CPR, but the view shows the wooden construction used in freight cars and the varieties of equipment then in use.  Although the colouring process obscures them, the roof-mounted brake wheels can be seen in most cases. This is the type of freight equipment which would be transported up and down the Big Hill near Field, British Columbia.

Operating rules and technology on the Big Hill were focused on the critical mission of maintaining passenger train safety above all. However, most of the CPR's revenue through the area would come from the transport of freight. This post looks at the processes and technology used for the safe movement of freight before the opening of the Spiral Tunnels in late 1909.

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The card to which this print is glued states this is CPR 376 at Field in 1886. One source states that this wheel arrangement was so rare in its use at Field that it doesn't warrant being mentioned. This 'perfect' wheel arrangement of that era can be contrasted with the following power.

from: West of the Great Divide; Robert D Turner; 1987; Sono Nis Press.

A Baldwin-built locomotive which was purchased for Big Hill service is shown above. It was probably photographed around 1890. The oil headlight and the fact that the locomotive has two sand domes are interesting details. One source remarked that the wooden pilot was handy because if a rockfall was struck, any locomotive entanglement could be resolved with an axe - rather than causing a longer delay on the road with a bent metal pilot fouling the track.

This locomotive is fitted with air brakes, which came into use after traffic had started operating on the Big Hill. The steam-operated air pump is just in front of the cab, with the main reservoir located under the engineer's position in the cab.

Earlier in Big Hill history, individual car handbrakes (only) had been used to control train speed - in conjunction with any braking technology available on the locomotives ... such as manual tender brakes, straight air brakes on the drivers and/or using the locomotive reverser (steam cutoff). There is no definitive source which chronicles exactly when particular technological advances were made on the Hill, partly because it was a gradual process with the railway using its usual method of derating and downgrading older equipment for less demanding service as better equipment became available. 

On the theme of getting along with imperfect technology ... it was a normal practice of the time that cars with air brakes would be marshaled behind an air brake-equipped locomotive so a continuous trainline, operated by the engineer leading, could be established ... then the rearmost cars - lacking air brakes - would be controlled with handbrakes.

My interest is in this particular photo stems from the fact that it shows a link and pin coupler system with a link actually in place and ready for use. You can see that the pin has been inserted above and then through the link to hold it in place. To mate with a higher coupler, the other slot could be used. 

To couple to a car in front, a trainman would have to position himself between the locomotive and the car ... guide the link into the car's slot by hand, and drop the pin at the precise instant it could capture the link at the car's coupler. If something went wrong, fingers could be lost at the coupler or the trainman could be crushed between the equipment. 

... With old photos, we can keep in mind the fact that railway locomotives were used in all weather and lighting conditions - in contrast to the cameras of the age.

I believe that the device tipped back at a 45 degree angle above the pin is a pushing buffer which could be dropped forward to provide a pushing surface without the complication of coupling the locomotive to the rolling stock being pushed.

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Here are a couple of random discoveries to suggest why this route with its troublesome grades was selected over the easier grades of the Yellowhead Pass. Some writers of Canadian history have suggested that it is an enduring mystery why Van Horne et al selected this southern route - over the previously favoured 'Canada Pacific' route used later by the Canadian Northern, Grand Trunk Pacific, and ultimately Canadian National. It is probably not a mystery ...

from: Toledo Blade, May 21 1908.

After finding that curious article, I perhaps found the date of this event:

In Commercial Canada (published c1922), a lavishly illustrated hardcover book which promotes those provinces, cities, industries and companies willing to purchase their own advertorial sections, there is a chronicle of significant dates in Canadian history. For the date April 21, 1891 is the following entry:

The first of the new CPR steamers arrived at Vancouver from Yokohama, beating the record by over two days. The mails were landed in Montreal in three days and 17 hours from Vancouver.

... It seems possible a US railroad/Grand Trunk Railway combination may have had the previous mail contract.

The CPR Syndicate intended to fight for every bit of Empire business they could get, by forming a land and ocean bridge between the Far East and Britain using their own ships and rails. As well, building close to the border via Field tended to make it easier to beat back cross-border advances attempted by JJ Hill's Great Northern Railway or any other American line trying to siphon away Canadian traffic.

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Safety Appliances

While looking for early CPR records in an 1887 edition of the Official Guide, I found two interesting articles about the efforts to select and standardize key safety appliances for use on US railroads. 

These same technologies were quickly embraced on the CPR's route down the Big Hill.

from: Official Guide; December 1887; National Railway Publication Co. collection of LCGagnon

Apparently, during this era, there were many manufacturers of the Janney type of coupler. When cars were received through interchange in the US, the receiving railroads were having trouble maintaining the necessary stores of proprietary spare parts to repair Janney-type couplers which failed on these 'borrowed' cars. Eventually, it was expected that spare parts would be interchangeable.

Janney couplers (fundamentally the same as those used today) were not as much 'automatic' as they were 'remote control' ... there was no need to adjust them in any way while equipment was moving. With the link and pin type, an employee had to move between cars when cars were being coupled ... and to uncouple, an employee would often have to wait for slack to remove a pin.

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from: Official Guide; December 1887; National Railway Publication Co. collection of LCGagnon

This test data is interesting to read. In contrast with the non-automatic nature of so-called 'automatic couplers' ... Test 7 above reflects the valuable characteristics of the 'automatic air brake'. That is, if a coupler fails and the train separates, the brakes apply to all cars automatically as the train line pressure break initiates the emergency brake application on all cars.

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Getting Back to Field

from: Souvenir of My Trip through the Canadian Rockies on the CPR. No publisher, no date.

The scale of the country dwarfs the railway operations around Field. 

Today the Trans-Canada Highway and most of the traffic are to be found on the left side of this photograph - on the opposite side of the Kicking Horse River flats. When this photograph was taken, only the horse stables used to support local commercial travel and tourist excursions were found opposite the town site on the other side of the river.

from: Souvenir of My Trip through the Canadian Rockies on the CPR. No publisher, no date.

A dining hall for passengers was built near the small Field station during the first summer of passenger operations. Mount Stephen House (a CPR hotel) in its final version - seen above - was completed in 1901. 

In the photo above, Mount Stephen House is the large building at the left, with the Field station and its two gabled dormers between it and the camera. The dining hall is the 2 1/2 storey building mid-way between Mount Stephen House and the roundhouse. After the development of Mount Stephen house for tourists, the dining hall continued to serve meals to railway staff around the clock.

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I am repeating the timetable and footnotes section for the CPR 'Mountain Section' here as some details are referred to in the freight train rules which apply to the Big Hill.

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Here are the rules which apply to freight trains on the Big Hill

Rule 4 requires a unique 'running brake test'.
'Water brakes' are described in this supplementary posting: Water Brake - Used on the Big Hill

To summarize the rules for descending freight trains: ... When things were functioning normally, each (total: three) section of downhill track guarded by/ending with a (total: three) Safety Switch was a block which could be occupied by a train. But, with the key condition being that: the train ahead must have cleared the next Safety Switch ... before the train following it could pass the Safety Switch being viewed by its headend crew.

... Knowing that a preceding train had cleared the next safety switch downhill, was intended to ensure that any potential runaway was ALWAYS facing its own diverging Safety Switch, with no possibility of hitting the rear of another train.

from: Van Horne's Road; Omer Lavallee; 1971-1981; Railfare Enterprieses Ltd

After the Third Safety Switch, a fourth control point (for freights) was at the 'tunnel in the shoulder of Mount Stephen' (Rule 12: "tunnel 13.1") - the postcard image is repeated below. On the track section beyond the Third Safety Switch, the grade was reduced. It was here that the descending train would stop until its wheels were sufficiently cooled and the shack pictured below was perhaps the location from which the crew would advise the tender of Safety Switch Three that they were departing the area for Field.

Don't worry too much if you can't decipher this last page ...

It seems the actual physical characteristics of the staff system will remain a mystery for a while. It does not seem to resemble the staff system put into operation in the Ottawa-Hull area by the CPR around 1915 after a significant collision there (in which my grandfather and his siblings were passengers).

In books published about the Big Hill area - the authors of which having done much more research than I have - the text tends to just quote and/or rephrase the rules above without actually elaborating on how the staff system connected with any electrical receptacles and without providing further details on its operation. ... For workers at Field, the physical characteristics of the staff system would be seen before individual workers would require the necessary fluency with its rules above, and before they assumed responsibility for operating it. Working backwards from historical procedures with no artifact or diagram can lead to dead ends.

In Special Rule 5 above: Rule 91 in the Standard Code of 1902 requires 5 minutes between freight trains.

In Special Rule 18, the formal 'Kicking Horse Grade' of the title is obligingly referred to as the Big Hill.

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The following article, published in the 1920s, harkens back to events which occurred during the era of the 4.5% grade of the Big Hill.

from: Montreal Gazette; June 12, 1924.

The undated image above was printed by a Montreal postcard company. A couple of days after posting this, I was visiting a local bookstore. In a recently published 'coffee table book' I happened to find the original black and white image from which the postcard was painted. The unmatched road numbers on the number plate and tender don't match the actual number plate in the original photo.

In the Janney-type coupler knuckle on the engine's pilot, you'll notice an adaptation of new technology to accept the old. The slot in the coupler knuckle could receive an old-fashioned link and a pin could be dropped into the knuckle to secure it.

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While the coming and going of passenger train names, consists, technology and schedules was celebrated in advertising, postcards and newspaper articles, scant attention was paid to the scheduled freight trains running on the Big Hill: Number 71, the Coast Freight, and Number 72, the Seaboard Freight.

... So here, without even a Whymper, ends a partial interpretation of the technology and processes used in freight service on the Big Hill.

CPR 1984 Field, British Columbia

In June of 1984, we travelled to Lake Louise on The Canadian, set up our 'rough base camp' at the Chateau Lake Louise where our room overlooked the still-frozen lake, rented a car and spent a little time driving back and forth on the highway between Lake Louise and Field.

Below is a Government of Canada topographic map showing the area - I have skewed it to the north-east so the CPR main line looks more westbound or eastbound. Lake Louise is off the map to the right. The right margin is at the Great Divide - which is also the border between Alberta and British Columbia. To the east of this line, the water drains into Hudson Bay, to the west it drains into the Pacific. 

The photos come from a sequence taken of a freight with what looks to be a high priority consist. As it made its way around the various loops and up grades, there was ample time to get into position for photographs. We finally parted company as it passed under us on Highway 1, just east of the Alberta border - at the map's right edge.

I have included an employee timetable from the Laggan Sub from five years before our visit. 

With a fresh Field crew aboard, the power begins to pull in front of the Field station. I would guess the incoming tailend crew was driven out to the van at the west end of Field, and that they probably radioed through their own brake test once aboard.

In most cases elsewhere, the brake test was performed by the incoming headend crew and the outgoing tailend crew. Then, guided by the incoming tailend crew's portable radio, the train would slow in front of the depot where the outgoing tailend crew would swing off the van and the incoming tailend crew would swing aboard. The tailend would then radio something like 'All aboard, extra 6018 east, highball '. 

But ... eastbound at Field, most trains probably could not afford to give away any momentum they had gained to slow down enough to allow safe boarding of the tailend crew right at the depot.

(A reporter writing about standard railway procedures - which were being explained at the inquiry into the Mississauga disaster - quipped that this is why everyone wants to be a train crew member ... to be able to radio things like 'All aboard. Highball!')

From the same vantage point, the units have cleared the east switch at Field and have started their ascent. The track disappears behind the trees.

Seen from the Spiral Tunnel lookout beside the Trans-Canada Highway, the train crosses over itself at the lower Spiral Tunnel.

Its climb exaggerated by a zoom lens, the power is just turning to face roughly south at the location marked Yoho on the map.

The photo is taken near the overpass of the Trans-Canada between the lower and upper Spiral Tunnels.

CPR 1909 Brakes on the Big Hill, Part 1 - Passenger Trains

(Four Big Hill technology posts are listed together under Railway Technology)

Somewhere I purchased a rough, coffee-stained, stapled photocopy of a 1909 CPR employee timetable which covers the track over the 'Great Divide' in the Rocky Mountains. No source is indicated. 

In its own way, the timetable marks a divide between the elite 'mountain crews' who ran CPR trains on The Big Hill with its exceptional 4.5% grade ... and normal 'run-through' crews operating over the grade reduction achieved through the construction of Spiral Tunnels which cut this gradient approximately in half.

In fact, the Spiral Tunnels opened three months after this timetable became effective. So the procedures outlined represent the final refinement of the CPR's methods and technologies for getting trains safely between Stephen and Field on that exceptional mainline grade.

Although it happens rarely - freight runaways still occur on this section of track, even with computer and dynamic-braking equipped diesel-electrics. In relative terms this remains the 'Big Hill'.

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To understand the era, I tried to find some illustrations of the technology used during this period. The following two images are Master Car Builder diagrams for passenger cars which were reproduced in 'The Science of Railways'. 

from: The Science of Railways; 1891-1900; The World Railway Publishing Co.

from: The Science of Railways; 1891-1900; The World Railway Publishing Co.

An excellent article based on notes made by Thomas Huntley Crump regarding the early practices in the region appeared in the Canadian Railroad Historical Association's Canadian Rail of December 1974 - this can be read on line. As always happens, there were sometimes modifications to the practices prescribed in writing - which follow below.

While the hardware pictured above looks labour-intensive to build, and quaint in its details and workmanship, this was also a time of significant innovation. Crump states that 'Miller bars' ran through the mountains in the early days rather than the Janney coupler. Automatic train air brakes had just been developed by Westinghouse when the CPR main line through the mountains opened. Although Janney couplers and automatic air brakes made the running trades safer, the crews were working with new technology on a new railway line. 

There were other technologies to master on the hill such as engine 'water brakes', and an electric staff system to regulate track occupancy on the hill - both covered in Part 2. Management was probably still developing its ideas about how things should be run to get the required balance between speed and safety.

Things were 'simple' for the workers: there was one single top priority: safety. The other single top priority was running on schedule.

Certainly, the mountain crews would become expert in the practice of their unusual craft ... and something was probably lost when 'just anybody' could run a train between Laggan and Field.

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This first post will look at the strict rules for handling passenger trains. Perhaps no one would miss a few boxcars in the bush, but prominent people travelled on these main line passenger trains. A lot of CPR heads would roll if this section of Canada's only modern land link between Atlantic and Pacific killed important passengers on a regular basis.

Here is the timetable showing the scheduled trains. I have altered the original printing slightly to include the westbounds and eastbounds in one image and to rotate the footnotes 90 degrees so you can read them easily.

The Big Hill section includes the point of the continental divide at Stephen in the east and Field to the west. Below I have skewed a Government of Canada topographic map with 1980 data to conveniently outline the physical features.

Between Hector and the rectangle L551 was the steepest part of the grade. On this map, the old Big Hill route is occupied by the highway in places.

If you consider all the trouble and money taken to loop the track through the Spiral Tunnels, you can imagine that an almost straight line from Hector to L551 would have been unusually steep.

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from: Van Horne's Road; Omer Lavallee; 1971-1981; Railfare Enterprieses Ltd

The grade required 'safety switches' which were permanently attended by switchmen. These three switches were 'normal' when lined for the steeply-ascending, dead-end diverging route. As you will read, only a whistle signal from the descending engineer, and the switchman agreeing with the engineer's assessment that the train was under control, would result in the switch being lined so the train could continue down the main track. Safety Switch No 1 is shown below.

To make a long rule short:

Rule 2 states that brakes must be operating normally on each passenger car. Otherwise that car must be braked by hand within the train so that 100% of the brakes are working in some fashion during the descent.

A Science of Railways article on retaining valves circa 1900 is here: Air Brake Retainer Valve c1900

Rule 4 forbids any movement following a passenger train between Hector and Field ... so that a passenger train will not be struck if the movement behind it loses control on the hill. This meant that for the full 45-60 minutes that it took a westbound passenger train to descend 15.6 miles, it would be the only traffic allowed on the hill. Perhaps this helps explain the often-repeated story that dining cars were not put on the first CPR trains through the Rockies to maximize the number of passengers which could be carried on a train.

Rule 8 is interesting as it directs trainmen to change a burst air hose without turning the cut-off cock to avoid the risk of train line pressure rising and train brakes being released inadvertently.

Rule 13 affects the 'normalling' of the retainer valves on cars usually used in passenger service on the approach to Field. However, freight cars on the headend (probably with roof-mounted retainers) are exempt until the train stops at Field.

Rule 14 wants the tailend of the passenger train which has just arrived at Field protected at once by having a crew member turn the switch behind it ... and Rule 4 wants Hector to be notified immediately of the arrival so more traffic can be released to descend the hill.

This unmailed postcard is undated, and hand-painted in Britain but may be circa 1900 or before.

Below I have enlarged the lead power. Shays were reportedly used on the Hill at first, but proved to be too slow. The lead has some Shay-ish qualities. It seems to be putting out more exhaust than the other two.

This undated postcard, printed in Victoria BC, was not mailed. Seen beyond the tunnel is the location where the serious grade began. Notice that the relatively light rails are spiked without tie plates. The shack to the right of the tunnel may be for maintenance of way supplies, or it may shelter a rock watchman.

from: Canadian Rail; December 1974; CRHA. Photo from 1898 by MM Stephens, agent at Field. Switchman is Pete Thibodeau.

Safety Switch No 1 is shown again. The switchman is attending his switch and the steepness of the runaway track is seen. Notice the stub switch. Wires from the telegraph system lead to the substantial switchtender's cabin. The magazine caption states the locomotive is ascending, but the dust or smoke might actually be trailing it down hill. Once the photo has been taken the switch will be lined for the runaway track. 

Avid railway photographers are pulling their hair out because a 3/4 view of a locomotive is obscured by a pole. If only they could have done another runpast! 

from: Canadian Rail; December 1974; CRHA.

Once again, to try to imagine the 'human experience' of railroading on the Big Hill, here is a photo of the technology in use circa 1905 with the Kicking Horse River rushing toward the Pacific below. Two of the 562's crew seem relatively relaxed as they look down their train. The 562 has a respectable main air brake reservoir beneath the cab. The truss rods of the wooden equipment are seen. 

Indeed, it is thrilling to be pushed up a hill by a steam locomotive working hard. The sights, sounds and smells of a train fighting its way up the Big Hill would have been unforgettable. However, all we have seen are passenger trains ascending the hill ... and a single light engine.

... But so much energy was put into the legalistic language, to create airtight boxes of logic, to regulate the descent of passenger trains. 

In a relative way, tourists would probably have been rather bored by the hour taken up with both the preparatory fiddling around, and then the squealing metal-on-metal descent from Hector to Field. Most of the trip was made at a the speed of a person jogging beside the tracks ... or slower.

But for those who really understood how gravity affects tons of steel and wood which could run away in some kind of hell-bent acceleration at an exponential rate ... the thrill of the hill would have been in how a runaway was being prevented during every minute of the descent. 

Except for the ratcheting of the occasional hand brake, it was all being accomplished with fluids: air, some very hot water and steam. In turn, and when required, the conductor, trainmen and fireman would play their parts. For the most part, disaster was being staved off through the controls manipulated by the engineer. 

Ultimately, the passengers and the crew might owe their lives to the railway employee seeming to do the least ... someone who was seen just throwing a switch and waving to the engine crew as they passed.