16 December 1990

Three Whistles Down the Line

Train lovers have good reason to rejoice this year; local historians, too, for "Canadian Pacific Railway Stations" and "Steel Rails and Iron Men" are just about as good as such books can be; were they any better, that is, more thorough, they would interest only technicians and scholars.
 
I am sure, along with Ian Baird, that "railway stations were more than merely places where the train stopped. They were also centers of community and commercial activity, focal points for expanding urban development".
 
What I'm not so sure about is that these stations "were a unique architectural form that often expressed in design and purpose the nature of the community and the character of the people they served". The glitch in this argument is that the stations were built by the railway companies, not local residents. Like most homes and building, only a great deal of living gave them the shape and atmosphere that we can still see and feel today.
 
Disagreeing with part of Baird's argument does not detract one iota from one's enjoyment of this well-written and even better-documented study. "Canadian Pacific Railway Stations" with a short survey of the CPR in BC, which is followed by an introduction to the Architectural Features of CPR stations. The body of the text is taken up by a station-by-station account of the stations by division:  Vancouver Island, Vancouver, Kettle Valley, Kootenay, and Revelstoke. It concludes with a bibliography and index.
 
Besides appealing to all the expected audiences ( train buffs, modellers, heritage people, amateur historians ), this book is an introduction to a time, and to many places, that simply don't exist any more, either in our collective memory, or in the history books.
 
"Steel Rails and Iron Men" is quite a different book. Written by the author of "McCulloch's Wonder:  The Story of the Kettle Valley Railway", it is a pictorial history ( more than 150 original photos ) - really a mile-by-mile story - of the birth, life, and death of a railway. the author's writing is at once economical and informative. It is also direct.
 
"The takeover of the Kettle Valley Railway by the CPR at the start of 1931 gave Canadian Pacific a truly integrated rail network in British Columbia. However, the unification had the misfortune of being coincident with the early stages of a long period of economic depression in Canada, and the detrimental effects of the depression more than offset any gains made by the amalgamation".
 
"Late in 1930 the Copper Mountain mine closed, slicing off a quarter of the KVR's freight tonnage. The Trail smelter, the KVR's other most significant traffic generator, greatly curtailed production. The summer of 1931 was the hottest and driest in southern British Columbia since records started being kept before the turn of the century, destroying the Okanagan fruit crop that year. Grasshoppers by the millions swept the countryside. their broken carcasses so greased the rails that trains could sometimes hardly move. Forest fires ravaged the southern interior. In all it was a discouraging year for the new Kettle Valley Division".
 
I'll bet it was, but Barrie sanford's handling of the information makes very good local history. The captions are no less readable; about one construction site, he writes:  "Further frustrations! Engine 3640 holds a piledriver in position as piles are placed on a temporary trestle across a washout near Erris created when a beaver dam gave way and overwhelmed the culvert under the railway roadbed in 1939. The piles are 90 feet in length, making the workers in the scene appear almost insignificant".
 
"Steel Rails and Iron Men" is further illustrated with reproductions of an amazing variety of documents, ongoing datelines, tunnel data, and it is so well designed that not one of the book's 165 pages is cluttered. This book is a pleasure to look at and to read.