CNR 1941 Montreal Public Timetable Folder 'L'

The opening of the new extension of the REM (Réseau express métropolitain) to Deux Montagnes provided me with the inspiration to post this little 3 x 7 inch pocket folder showing the schedule over some of the same route 84 years ago. 

Through the work of intrepid videographers who have posted their experiences on YouTube, I have enjoyed a few virtual trips over the newly-opened line. I am an avid comment reader and people there noted that it takes about four years to work out all of the glitches occurring on a new branch of a modern automated system such as the REM. 

... I have observed cases where the REM line to Brossard had an understandable reliability problem. The failing was made much worse by simply not having enough trained people to communicate with stranded passengers ... and to support them in person so they didn't feel they were abandoned in a locked glass and metal box. Sometimes management drops the ball when these new systems begin service.

Even during weeks when I am pressed for time/energy, I try to provide a few illustrations because people often enjoy looking at historical images rather than just using their imaginations to re-animate a dry, old schedule which has been photocopied onto the internet.

In one CRHA article I reviewed, there were images from the 1970s showing tremendous, long trains carrying commuters pulled by a couple of electric 'haulers', heading for the Mount Royal Tunnel and Central Station. Mackenzie and Mann would be proud to see their old equipment travelling on their old, cleverly-conceived route into the heart of Montreal. 

... One might be tempted to post these photos and opine on how much [more] was done [more cheaply] with the skilled use of the old reliable technology. 

I suppose the appreciation of human history can lead one to an alternative conclusion - that there is always 'new stuff' which replaces familiar technology. The old technology functioned, and was supported by its operators, in a predictable way so there were generally no unprecedented surprises. 

However, the new technology often offers immediate advantages, and even greater possibilities in the future ... if only the casual observer could foresee the system's future operations with the insight of an expert.

When this timetable was issued, a German amphibious invasion of England had been prevented by the success of the defenders during the Battle of Britain (and 'the stopping power of water' - the English Channel). 

Germany's fatal error of invading the USSR in a surprise attack began on exactly the effective date of this timetable. 

A similarly ill-considered Japanese attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor was still a few months in the future.

The Battle of the Atlantic had not been going particularly well and the fatal weakening of Britain by U-boat destruction of food, materials, fuel and armaments was still a clear possibility.

... The people riding these trains probably had a lot to think about.

from: Report on Railway Terminal Facilities at Montreal; January 1929; Department of Railways and Canals.

On the map above, Bonaventure station is seen between St James and Notre Dame. The Tunnel Terminal appears near Windsor Street. This map of the CNR in Montreal was part of a 'Railways and Canals' government study to possibly develop a 'union station' for railway passenger service in Montreal.

For non-Montrealers, that new REM segment follows the route off the top left of the map through Roxboro.

For the purposes of the CNR, (according to Michael Leduc in Montreal Railway Terminals; 2008; Michael D Leduc Enr.) Bonaventure was "MONTREAL". Other terminals were identified by their names ... during the Canadian National Railways era.

The sharp-eyed will have noticed my map omits one pre-1950 terminal and that its CNR name is different from its 'familiar historical name' on the Folder's title page (above).

from: Montreal Then and Now; Bryan Demchinsky; 1985; The Gazette.

Things were so much better in the old days. People could go boating in railway yards. Before the construction of a levee on the St Lawrence to protect this part of the city, flooding was a regular occurrence - though not as bad as this extreme 1886 event. At the right, you can see the railway's freight sheds where boxcar contents were unloaded and transferred to wagons, perhaps sleds in winter, with draft horses providing motive power.

This was the first version of a Grand-Trunk-sized Bonaventure station. A new high-Victorian-style Bonaventure was built in 1887. These two photos are extra large so people can see historical details if they enjoy that kind of thing.

From somewhere within this scene was probably the original surveyor's stake which was the basis for all of today's mileage markers on the CNR Kingston Subdivision - although few current employees probably ponder this bit of historical trivia.

.

from: The Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore; Ron Brown; 1991; Broadview Press.

Here is the interior of the 1887 version of the Grand Trunk Bonaventure station. First Class, Pullman tickets and Telegrams. 

Used, undated postcard.

Here is Grand Trunk Bonaventure (looking timetable west), after a fire in 1916 which resulted in its being rebuilt without its elaborate Victorian exterior. The stained glass windows apparently survived the fire. By observing the central windows, you can confirm where the black and white interior photo was taken. 

In 1948, a fire in the extensive neighbouring freight sheds, damaged the station building and this ended the use of Bonaventure for all passenger trains. Central Station had been open since 1943 and most intercity traffic had already been moved there, with Bonaventure left to anchor the CNR West Island commuter service.

Here are the 1941 tables for Bonaventure.

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Tunnel Terminal

Unused postcard.

Mackenzie and Mann's Canadian Northern MONTREAL terminal began operation when the war-delayed Mount Royal Tunnel was complete in 1918. 

With the almost immediate takeover by Canadian National Railways, this became known as Tunnel Terminal. And artists made ham-handed changes to the images on their postcards (see the station 'letterboard' above). The old Canadian Northern circular crests seem not to be altered here in the image, and the circular format was temporarily used to display 'Canadian National'.

from: Report on Railway Terminal Facilities at Montreal; January 1929; Department of Railways and Canals.

City Beautiful Urban Planners decried the hole opened up by this terminal and this 'scar' on the landscape persisted into the 1960s. 

Sadly for everyone, Mackenzie and Mann (and Sir Henry Thornton) had foreseen grand urban-centre developments over this hole, but none of these railway officers were around long enough, or were provided with the resources to carry out their plans.

Above, is a coarse-dithered 5-inch photo from the terminals report. At the left, you can see an electric locomotive and a couple of coaches. Two other sets of coaches are ready at other platforms, with boxcars on the express track to the right.

Here are the 1941 tables for Tunnel Terminal

Table 11 (above): St Catherine Street East Station

(aka Moreau Street)

from: Report on Railway Terminal Facilities at Montreal; January 1929; Department of Railways and Canals.

The green terminal under 'Ontario' marks the location of this station.

from: Report on Railway Terminal Facilities at Montreal; January 1929; Department of Railways and Canals.

Above: Another coarse-dithered 5-inch photo from the terminals report. Mackenzie and Mann obtained control of the Great Northern Railway of Canada in 1903 and this was its terminal. Presumably, this was the GNRC station known as MONTREAL. 

The Canadian Northern referred to it as the St Catherine Street East station. This was perhaps because it drew an attractive link to the main commercial street of Montreal. Or perhaps it was logical to use the St Catherine name if passengers were using the streetcar to reach the station.

Before the completion of the Mount Royal Tunnel, this was the terminal for Canadian Northern trains going to Ottawa and Toronto via Hawkesbury. Its use for trains to Joliette and Rawdon on the CNR ended in June 1945 when these routes were changed to terminate at Central Station.

Undated photo from article: A Historical Railway & Canal Atlas of Canada; CA Andreae; Canadian Rail, July 1980.

from: Google Maps

I believe the block once containing the Moreau St station is centred in the image above: Adam, Roy, St Catherine, Moreau. The former interchange connection between Moreau St and the CPR Hochelaga yard (just beyond the left margin) can be imagined.

GNRC 1902 Great Northern Railway of Canada - Hawkesbury to Joliette

Performing one of his intensive and thorough searches on particular historical topics, Jim Christie was probably looking for references to a hard metallic carbide. Instead he found an advertisement for flammable calcium carbide in a book entitled: Amidst the Laurentians; NM Hinshelwood; 1902; Montreal Herald - A link to the book is provided below.

 Jim was kind enough to share the reference with people interested in the region. 

The book's main subjects are the Great Northern Railway of Canada, and Shawinigan Falls.

The book's descriptive account of the attractions along the western section of the line follows below.

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Here are the key legislative dates in the short life of the GNRC.

1883 

The Great Northern Railway Company was incorporated to build from St Andrew's [East, Quebec] to a point on the North Shore Railway via Argenteuil, Two Mountains, Terrebonne, L'Assomption, Montcalm, Joliette, Berthier, Maskinonge, St Maurice and Champlain Counties.

1884

An agreement with the Carillon and Grenville Railway Co was authorized.

1896-1898

Absorption of Lower Laurentian, Quebec and James Bay, Montfort & Gatineau Colonization, railways authorized. 

1899

Name change to Great Northern Railway of Canada authorized.

1905

Canadian Northern Railway allowed to lease the GNRC and to guarantee its bonds.

1906

GNRC, Chateauguay & Northern, Quebec New Brunswick & Nova Scotia, railways authorized to be reorganized to form the Canadian Northern Quebec Railway Company.

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GNRC Map and Related Links

Book link: Amidst the Laurentians

The text says that the Joliette to Montreal line of the GNRC was not yet completed.

To review the Moreau Street terminal, along with the other terminal stations which the CNR inherited ...

you may wish to check my earlier effort to organize them in my own head ...

Earlier post on the evolution of CNR's Montreal Terminals

This map conveys a lot of information with the informality of a pen and ruler.

Horse-drawn binders harvest the richness of the Prairies, as labourers 

(often new immigrants) stook the sheaves of wheat to dry.

Somewhere in the centre-distant urban coal smudge is the way west. Only small canal boats can ascend the Lachine Canal on their way via the St Lawrence, and its small Canadian canals, to the Great Lakes. 

At the extreme right, the Bonsecours Market (primarily farm produce) is in full operation. 

To the Market's left, in the distance, boxcars on the Grand Trunk harbour tracks empty their freight into dockside freight sheds, for loading onto coastal and ocean-going ships. 

At the water's edge, a line of carriages awaits passengers alighting from the shallow-draft paddleboats. A spectacular excursion for tourists is offered by one of them on the page below. Other boats will travel to ports along the St Lawrence and its tributaries ... and up the Ottawa River canals.

*  *  *

Below: Notre Dame Basilica's twin spires, grain elevators and the Victoria Bridge are seen against the St Lawrence.

Above: The Bank of Montreal head office (with its fluted pillars), where Donald Smith and George Stephen could often be found.

I purchased this photograph of a postcard at a railway show. This view looks down the Ottawa River with Quebec and the Grenville Canal on the left bank. This canal is the waterway which some of the Montreal Harbour paddleboats would have travelled. Hawkesbury, Ontario is on the right bank. 

The closer bridge is the Perley (road) Bridge. The distant bridge is that of the GNRC/CNoR, later the CNR.

The Perley Bridge

Jim Christie recalls that his father (about age 10) was, without prior arrangement, deputized to help cut the ribbon to open the Perley Bridge in 1931 at its official opening ceremony. 

The project was originally promoted by Argenteuil MP George Perley (1857-1938) in 1909 ... and was named after him when it opened. Perley served as Canadian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and Minister of the Canadian Overseas Military Forces during the Great War.

The bridge was finally constructed in 1930-31 as a 'make work project' early in the Great Depression. The bridge was re-constructed to raise it by 10 feet or so in 1961 as a result of the building of the hydro dam at Carillon (12 miles downstream, built 1959-1964). This reservoir raised the Hawkesbury water level by about 10 feet.

I often travelled over this bridge on weekends in the late 1970s and its age (almost 50 years old), narrowness, and added height provided a certain sense of ... adventure ... when the bridge was shared with one of the many heavily-loaded trucks engaged in interprovincial commerce!

While the railway bridge was designed to carry that kind of weight, large diesel-powered (often overloaded) semi-trucks had not been foreseen in the 1930s. And a traffic light right at the foot of the long, steep bridge ramp on the Quebec side kept everyone on their toes.

*  *  *

Below, this view of the railway bridge is from the Hawkesbury, Ontario side, looking up-river.

Above: The up-river (left) and down-river views of the Wilson Paper Mills dam on the North River.

CPR 1953 Windsor Station, Montreal: 1953 Christmas; 1957 Empty Trainshed; 1964 Lavallee History Article

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*  *  *

from: Canadian Pacific Spanner, February 1964.

from: Canadian Pacific Spanner, February 1964.

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.

*  *  *

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.

*  *  *

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

CNR 1961 Third Visit to Turcot Yard, Montreal, 17 August 1961

It's time to pay our final visit to Turcot Yard. 

A month has gone by and it's a nice day, so we'll take the bus to Upper Lachine Road 

and make our way down the escarpment one last time.

First Visit to Turcot Yard, Montreal, 17 July 1961

Second Visit to Turcot Yard, Montreal, 19 July 1961

Having just turned four, I will be taking neither photos nor notes.

However, I'll respond to every request of my father to get on the pilot of each engine and wave at the camera 

... so my apologies in advance.

I do not wander around in railway yards and I do not recommend that you do so either.

1521 - Built by MLW for CNoR in 1905, numbered as 1274. Renumbered in 1957.
Preserved at Middleton Railway Museum, Middleton, Nova Scotia.

Notice that the bell and glass number plates have been removed. An impressive amount of piping is shown here on the fireman's side of the boiler. This engine was originally sold to Andrew Maclean of Gravenhurst to attract attention to his antique shop. 

Most of my data comes from Canadian National Steam Power; Tony Clegg & Ray Corley; 1969; Railfare.

Through the miracle of the internet, the museum corresponded with me about this image a number of years ago and subsequently posted it on their Facebook page. LC Gagnon would be pleased to see his photos spreading out over the internet. 

You can get an idea of some of the scale of the scrapping process as you look down the deadline. One wonders if the CNR would have undergone a partial steam renumbering process in 1957 if they had known how quickly the new diesels could take over operations. They did need to open up blocks of roster numbers for the new diesels, but still ...

5061 - Built by MLW for GTR in 1913, numbered as 181.
Scrapped Sep 1961.

3345 - Built by CLC for Canadian Government Railways in 1918, numbered as 2945.
Scrapped Sep 1961.

5268 - Built by MLW for CGR in 1918, numbered as 496.
Scrapped Nov 1961.

4193 - Built by Alco-Brooks for Boston & Albany in 1919, numbered as 1107. 
To CNR in 1928, numbered as 4207. Renumbered Nov 1957.
Scrapped Dec 1961.

6189 - Built by CLC in 1940.
Scrapped Oct 1961.

6212 - Built by MLW in 1942. 
Scrapped Dec 1961.

At the left, you can see the bottom of the ramp ... up which engines and hopper cars of coal ran to load the coaling dock. 

Right behind the tender, in the distance, you can see the roundhouse.

6212 - Built by MLW in 1942. 
Scrapped Dec 1961.

As I/we remember events, it was at this point in our visit when a CNR Constable cordially invited us to leave the property. In early 1962, a couple of fires happened (were set) in the roundhouse. So in retrospect, 'we' understood that visitors didn't belong here. 

The roundhouse was scheduled for demolition and part of the infamous Échangeur Turcot would be built squarely over its former location. In the 1990s, my father and I returned and determined the spot where it had stood.

*  *  *

Here is the article which precipitated our visits.

If you look at the date of our first visit, it is the following Monday. 

Two days after the article appeared.

Our planning department must have been in overdrive to organize three generations of us for that first visit.

My father was excited about the fact that 'people can go and take pictures of them'.

(The previous April, the two of us had visited the CPR's Angus Shops 

where he had photographed the dead locomotives through their chain-link fence.)

It isn't clear that the CNR intended that image of a photographer to be an invitation to all.

The elements of the article are enlarged below.

This may be J Norman Lowe, the CNR historian.

"It's dirty work."

Dozens of white bricks of asbestos boiler lagging 

can be seen falling off the boilers of the two engines.