I had the pleasure of presenting a program with the above title to the Kingston Historical Society on March 20, 2024. Each year, the KHS compiles the topics of the year's presentations into Historic Kingston. Now that this annual has been published, here's my article:Over the past six years, I’ve been immersed in a facet of
Kingston history that, while not long gone, disappeared from today’s downtown
scene remarkably quickly. Two railways once plied the city’s industrial
waterfront, though only traces remain. My research, while entirely voluntary,
came with a rather unique goal – to reproduce, in scale, a miniature world of
buildings, tracks, trains and scenes circa 1970 on a home model railway named
Kingston’s Hanley Spur.
For purposes of my modelling, the Hanley Spur became an all-encompassing
term for Canadian National Railways (CN) and Canadian Pacific Railway (CP) trackage,
originally Grand Trunk Railway (GTR) and Kingston & Pembroke Railway
(K&P), respectively. I often refer to the trackage by the
predecessor/modern-era railway names K&P/CP and GTR/CN interchangeably. This
near-parallel trackage extended two miles downtown from the current Division
Street/Montreal Street area, ending at CP’s station yard across Ontario Street
at City Hall. The GTR/CN reached water level along Rideau, Wellington and
Ontario Streets, with spurs reaching Canadian Locomotive Co. and the shipyards near
West Street.
TWO RAILWAYS
The first GTR trains on the newly-completed mainline linking
Montreal and Toronto met in Kingston on October 27, 1856. The GTR barely
entered the limits of the city, its Outer Station boasting a yard and railway
offices, and 64x184-foot limestone engine house that stood until 1963. Later, CN
referred to the spur line as the Kingston Subdivision until the mid-1960s. At
that time, the Montreal-Toronto mainline, the busiest in Canada, was renamed
the Kingston Subdivision and the waterfront line was renamed the CN Hanley
Spur.
The GTR waterfront trackage extended 2.2 miles south from that
mainline just east of the Outer Station on Montreal St. Built in 1860 along
west shore of the Cataraqui River, it was crossed by the K&P at Mileage 1.0
(River Street), then extended across a causeway spanning Anglin Bay.
Local concern was voiced about the stagnant water behind that
causeway. A swing bridge operated midway along its embankment, providing marine
access to the bustling mills there. William Anglin filed suit for interference
by the embankment in his business, as vessels had difficulty negotiating the
obstacle. Sometime between 1875 and 1890, GTR’s branchline south of North
Street would be relocated west of the K&P, rejoining the original GTR line
near Ontario and Barrack Streets and the swing bridge was removed.
Sharing a mutual track crossing Ontario Street at Mi. 1.8-1.9,
a switchtender’s cabin stood at the intersection of Ontario and Barrack Streets.
The switchtender controlled CN and CP train movements on the joint section of
track, just east of City Hall. Located opposite the corner wall surrounding the
Tete du Pont barracks, the shanty remained in place until the early 1960’s. Continuing
across Ontario Street, a causeway fifty feet out from the Market Battery led
the GTR trackage towards the locomotive works, eventually ending at the Kingston
Shipyards.
James Morton, the owner of the Ontario Foundry, was awarded
the contract to build the 2.15-mile line that opened on November 10, 1860. This
new trackage meant a more efficient delivery option for locomotives built on
the site. Prior to this, the options were more challenging: water shipping from
the lakefront plant, or intricate laying of temporary street trackage to the
end-of-steel along Ontario Street. The first published date of a completed spur
to the plant was December 17, 1864, though five locomotives had been delivered
to the GTR in 1856 via temporary trackage.
The Kingston & Pembroke Railway was chartered in 1871
with the first sod for the line’s construction turned in1872. By 1883, 36,000
passengers had already been carried. The new line reached Renfrew in 1885,
making a connection with the Canadian Pacific (Ontario & Quebec) at Sharbot
Lake. Once the Canadian Pacific’s Montreal-Toronto mainline was refined, the connection
was made at with CP Belleville Subdivision at Tichborne in 1923.
The K&P’s initial request to build on Fort Frontenac
lands was denied, though a spur laid to Montreal Transportation Co. grain
elevator came close to the site. The first passenger station, the southern
terminus of the line, was built on Place d’Armes instead, in 1873. Eleven acres
of swamp were filled in for yard tracks, turntable and roundhouse (at the foot
of the current North Street) between 1877 and 1883.
The first car of American coal reached Kingston on March 14,
1884, having crossed the St. Lawrence River from Morristown, NY to Brockville, then
north to Perth, west to Sharbot Lake, south on K&P to Kingston. While two-thirds
of K&P tonnage in 1890 was lumber, lead, talc, feldspar, and mica were shipped
to the US and Europe via Kingston’s spile docks. Easily-harvested mineral and
lumber resources in the area quickly played out. It was said that in 1903 there
was hardly a prospector in Ontario who searched beyond Frontenac and Hastings
counties, though a year later, not one prospector would remain in the area!
Freight traffic generated little revenue for Kingston or for
shareholders! High construction costs contributed to the K&P defaulting on
loan payments as early as 1893, and by 1900, CP owned 83% of K&P capital
stock. The CP subsumed the K&P as a paper railway in 1913, leasing it for a
period of 999 years and naming it the CP Kingston Subdivision. Conceived and
operated as a stand-alone railway up until that time, the 103-mile line was at
most a resource-based artery that crossed CP’s Montreal-Toronto mainline many
miles north of Kingston.
A rolling stock repair shop near Montreal Street (current Depot
School area) was built, succumbing to fire in 1905. The long-lived passenger
station, designed by William Newlands, was built in 1885 across from City Hall,
incorporating stone from the demolished Market Battery, with yard tracks laid in
1886. A 125-foot covered awning to a baggage room was demolished in 1960 after
the end of passenger service. CP’s nearby freight station was demolished in 1966
for Confederation Park development, with remaining railway business transferred
to Dalton Avenue.
“Kingston’s really distinguished town hall constructed years
before the railroad came and overlook the sweeping expanse of the river, now
faces the CPR’s unbeautiful designed to station and yards. Drab freight cars
are shunted and hauled immediately in front of the hall’s dignified pillared
and porticoed façade, a glum reminder that in some of its aspects progress can
be uncouth” –
Maclean’s magazine, 1941 article “This Is Kingston”.
TWO TRACKS
The K&P crossed the GTR near the Outer Station, on the alignment
of the current Hagerman Lane. As the number of trains increased, a grade
separation was built to allow the CP to cross the CN via a bridge built over
the CN in 1922 just east of the current Division Street. Between 1972 and 1974,
CN realigned its severe Outer Station curve between Montreal and Division
Streets. This spelled the end of the CP bridge, and when it was removed the CP
line downtown was virtually orphaned. A connection was built to CN just west of
Division Street, allowing CP to arrive from Smiths Falls and Tichborne once or
twice a week to exchange freight traffic with the CN there.
The namesakes of the spur were from the Hanley family, long-serving
ticket agents in Kingston’s downtown. Thomas Hanley and Frederick Bolger opened
a ticket agency in 1871 at the foot of Brock Street. Later, Thomas Hanley moved
the ticket office into part of the Anglo-American Hotel, on the corner opposite
to the Inner Station. Their ticket office finally moved in 1886 to the Grand
Trunk station designed by William Newlands, later staffed by Joseph and Clearly
Hanley. With the rise of the automobile causing the end of the Suburban service,
the Hanleys closed their Ontario and Johnson Street office, relocating to the
CN-leased office at Princess and Bagot Streets in the Mowat Building on October
1, 1930. A two-car shuttle train called the Suburban took 12 minutes to reach
the Outer Station, linking the downtown Inner Station at Johnson and Ontario
Streets from 1885-1930, with a through sleeping car from 1911-1929 for business
travellers.
Both CN and CP gradually pulled up their trackage from
downtown to the north. With the closing of the Canadian Locomotive Company
(later Fairbanks-Morse Canada) factory in 1969, a single track remained
skirting the lake opposite City Hall. Its last train was likely the British Flying
Scotsman LNER 4472 steam locomotive on its North American tour in September,
1970.
The construction of the OHIP building on Wellington Street
marked the southern end of the downtown trackage, though a CN spur to the
Kingston Whig-Standard newsprint warehouse off Cataraqui Street, receiving its
last shipments in 1986. The CP line north from Kingston was abandoned in that
year.
TWO MILES
Downtown industries were growing and required rail service to
reach wider markets. The city gave tax exemptions and incentives for spur
construction to new industries:
•
1894
– Montreal Transportation Co. elevator
•
1894
– Joseph Carrington tannery
•
1896
– William Bailey broom factory
•
1898
– Dominion Cotton Mills
•
1899
– James Richardson elevator
•
1899
– Kingston Elevator & Transit Co.
•
1903
– Canadian Locomotive Co.
•
1904
– A. Davis & Son Tannery
•
1905
– Selby & Youlder Foundry
•
1907
– Stanley Smelting Works
•
1909
- Kingston Milling Co.
•
1910
– Kingston Shipbuilding Co.
•
1913
- Reliance Moulding Co.
Shipyards, coal yards, a tannery, feed mills, terminal grain
elevators, downtown passenger station, freight sheds and team tracks lined the
waterfront. The locomotive plant producing giant mainline locomotives rose to
become Canada’s second largest locomotive manufacturer, second only to Montreal
Locomotive Works. The Canadian Locomotive Company produced its 1000th in 1911, its
2000th in 1942, and its 3000th in 1958. The Kingston Shipyards built 108
freighters, corvettes and scows, and Kingston’s own lake freighter, the D.C.
Everest.
Beginning in the late 1940s, several warehouses were built
along Railway Street with CP spurs: Coca-Cola, MacCosham Van Lines, Canfor/Gamble
& Robinson and Weston’s Bakeries.
At the Queen’s University Archives, I was able to find
individual carloads handled by CN and CP to Kingston industries. An example of
each: a 1919 Michigan Central gondola car loaded with steel plates from Steubenville,
Ohio’s Labelle Iron Works to the Kingston Shipyards, and a 1949 boxcar of hides
from Three Rivers, Quebec to the Davis Tannery.
TO OBLIVION
Due to failed attempts at trans-shipment (intermodal)
business model, Kingston developed into a mercantile economy, not a booming
industrial metropolis. Kingston’s proximity to larger cities with more
expansive manufacturing, and the enlarging of the Welland Canal and opening of
the St. Lawrence Seaway were contributing factors to the receding of waterfront
industries and their accompanying rail spurs.
The rise of the personal automobile and the advent of freight-handling
by trucks shifted travel and shipping from rails to roads. The extension of Highway
401 accelerated this shift through the 1950’s to the 1970’s.
Kingston’s new manufacturing sites like Alcan and DuPont were
outside the downtown. Both were served by new CN spurs constructed in the 1930’s
and 1940’s. Well-known industries that originated here, some being family
businesses, would not or could not grow with the times, holding onto
tried-and-true manufacturing methods.
Gentrification eventually took hold of former manufacturing
and railway lands, as coal gave way to condos, rails to trails, workers’
housing to a seniors’ home and freight sheds to government offices.
What remains? Doug Fluhrer Park hosts a recreated short track
segment, at the southern end of the Urban K&P Trail on Wellington Street.
The angled rear of buildings along Ontario Street between Princess and Queen
Streets belies the presence of the joint section that once passed there. Though
there are former K&P and GTR passenger stations still standing downtown, the
stabilized, fire-tinged shell of the Outer Station on Montreal Street is slowly
decaying. Nearby, on the Village on the River apartment property, are the remnants
of the Montreal Street subway underpass removed in March, 1976.
One would have to be over 70 years of age to have worked in
Kingston’s downtown industries, or perhaps even to know a family member who
did. I have a few memories of the area from the 1970s, but even I find it
challenging to reconcile the booming industries that lined the waterfront with
the mere traces that remain. Achieving the goal of my research, I have been
able to enjoyably and accurately portray over 30 of these businesses, amid
historically-accurate scale scenes of railway operations that trundled along Kingston’s
industrial waterfront circa 1970.
