C O N T E X T 9 2 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 5 33 with economic cycles and periods of consolidating smaller companies such as the Great Western and Canadian Northern Railways into what eventually became the nationalised Canadian National Railway in 1923. Railway building played a leading role in urban and rural development in Ontario. The stations and the track made a dramatic visual impact on the Canadian pioneer landscape. ‘It is an interesting thing,’ the Globe noted in 1853, ‘to see those stations in the middle of the forest with only a few houses in sight… a little building set down by the side of the road for the accommodation of passengers and officials… they are in such glaring contrast to the locomotive and the train which we are accustomed to associate with towns.’ In northern communities the station was sometimes the first commercial building to locate in the town. When it closed or relocated the whole town could quickly disappear or move with the station. In the remote northern town of Nakina shops and houses were literally moved on railway flatcars when CN decided to move the station. In southern Ontario stations were normally sited near existing canals, ports, watercourses and industrial areas where they could be close to freight customers. The village of Elgin quickly boomed with the Great Western Railway constructed a new suspension bridge across the Niagara River in 1853. In 1879 the little wooden station was replaced by a large brick structure with decorative bargeboards which still stands today, although the town goes by the name of Niagara Falls. The early stations were described by the press as miserable shanties. Many were barn-like trainsheds that housed track and platforms, and more closely resembled engine sheds than the later track-side stations. Old boxcars, military buildings, country stores and houses were often pressed into use before proper stations could be built. Timber stations were assembled as pre-fabs, then shipped on railway flatcars to remote locations. The earliest station patterns built in Canada resembled houses with simple board-andbatten walls and wide overhangs above the platforms. Only one of this early type is know to survive, at a museum at King City, Ontario. By the 1850s railway companies began developing in-house styles that can be classified by period and by the region they were located in. The Grand Trunk Railway offered ‘first-class’ English stations in solid limestone with rows of Romanesque arched window and door openings arranged on the track side. Freight functions were housed separately.The handful of these stations that survive on the Montreal-Toronto line are highly valued as the earliest and best examples of early railway architecture in Canada. Grant aid and partnerships between CN and the Ontario Heritage Foundation have restored the exteriors and the waiting rooms at Port Hope and Napanee. From 1870 to 1890 the GTR began building secondgeneration stations as it expanded and acquired many short lines and then merged with the Great Western Railway. Typical of this period were pattern-book, single-storey stations of board and batten, with bay windows overlooking the tracks housing telegraphers and dispatchers. Remarkably few of these survive as operating stations, although a group are still operating north of Toronto on the GO commuter train network at Maple, Newmarket and Aurora. By the turn of the century the GTR was building The first Niagara Railway Suspension Bridge, seen here in 1859, was designed by John Augustus Roebling as the world’s first and only major railway suspension bridge.The towers resemble the style that Roebling used for his later Brooklyn Bridge (Photo: Ralph Greenhill Collection). Port Hope, Grand Trunk Railway (now operating CN) on the TorontoMontreal line, on Lake Ontario. Built in 1856 to the designs of the English railway station architect Francis Thompson as a first class station. One of a small group of the earliest stations in Canada, it was restored by the OHF/CNRail in 1985 (Photo: OHF).
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