The first residents of Westgrove, later Grovenor, expected that the tracks north of Stony Plain Road would someday extend all the way to Vancouver.
The name was certainly ambitious enough: the Edmonton, Yukon and Pacific Railway, chartered to snake through the Yellowhead Pass into B.C. Perhaps, in the event of another outbreak of gold fever, it would head north to the Klondike as well.
In 1907, as settlers started building houses along the MacKinnon Ravine, the first 30 kilometres or so of the EY&P were already operating: Strathcona to Edmonton to Stony Plains (the extra “s” eventually disappeared).
When the EY&P first train had crossed the Low Level Bridge on Oct. 20, 1902, it was an event of such magnitude that Mayor William Short declared a civic holiday.
Finally Edmonton was connected to the rest of the world by a more reliable form of transportation than steamships and stagecoaches. More importantly, it had secured a place on 20th century maps. In 1891, when the Calgary and Edmonton Railway dead-ended in Strathcona, it seemed like a matter of time before the new settlement swallowed up the town that had grown up on the north side of the river, around the old Hudson’s Bay Company Fort. Instead, 10 years after the first EY&P train, Edmonton annexed (or amalgamated with, to use the politically-correct term) Strathcona.
The route that first train took now makes for a lovely walk, especially on a fall afternoon. Start at the east side of the CPR rail yard. Between 68th and 69th Avenues, there’s a long grassy knoll that stretches all the way to the Mill Creek Ravine. (It’s an off-leash area for dogs now, so tread carefully.) The alignment through the ravine is preserved as a paved trail, and walking toward the river valley a hiker crosses four trestle bridges, reminders of the EY&P. The longest and most impressive is parallel to 76th Avenue.
Initially, the rails did not reach as far as Grovenor. Just getting across the river was good enough to start, so the EY&P put up a temporary station in Rossdale, northwest of the Low Level Bridge, and declared itself open for business. It was a frugal operation. When there was no money to buy coal, the engineer and fireman dug into a seam near the station hoping to find fuel for the tender. Construction standards had been exceedingly poor, which caused frequent derailments. For safety’s sake, trains crawled along at a maximum speed of 16 km/h.
At the end of November 1905, a second line reached Edmonton: the Canadian Northern Railway, from Winnipeg through Saskatoon, North Battleford and Fort Saskatchewan. As the CNoR and the EY&P shared the same ownership, under the direction of William Mackenzie and Donald Mann, linking the railways made sense. Malcolm MacCrimmon was given a contract to extend the EY&P up the north bank on the North Saskatchewan River. The line climbed over Victoria Park, wrapped along the east fork of the Groat Ravine and continued diagonally toward the CNoR yards, connecting near the Molson brewery.
In 1906, MacCrimmon started building westward, extending the EY&P on an alignment just a little bit north of today’s 106th Avenue, through areas now called Glenora, Grovenor, Canora, Britannia, Youngstown, Mayfield – and on to Stony Plains.
At the Edmonton Archives, early city maps show that the community of Westgrove was bounded by the railway to the north and the ravine to the south. The western city limit was 149th Street, where the independent town of Jasper Place took over jurisdiction. Curiously, to the east, Westgrove stretched all the way to 140th Street, beyond the current border of 142nd Street.
Stony Plains would turn out to be the end of the line for the EY&P. Out of money, Mackenzie and Mann lost the initiative to the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, which reached Edmonton from Wainwright in 1909 and kept building west to Jasper and eventually Prince Rupert. That year, on Apr. 23, the EY&P lost its independent corporate existence, becoming part of the CNoR.
When their finances improved, Mackenzie and Mann faced a choice: build from Stony Plains alongside the GTP line or take a more northerly route, through St. Albert, Onoway and Alberta Beach. This decision to explore virgin territory relegated the former EY&P to a spur, with three trains per week picking up grain from the Stony Plains elevator.
By 1923, both the CNoR and GTP were bankrupt and under direct federal government control. A new crown corporation, Canadian National Railways, consolidated duplicate lines: between Glenora and (now called) Stony Plain, the old EY&P right of way was abandoned, the rails removed.
The residents of Westgrove, now called Grovenor, would gladly have taken money from a fool willing to wager that someday boxcars would again pass through the community.
The Edmonton, Yukon and Pacific Railway had turned out to be a bit of a dud, stopping thousands of miles short of either destination. In the decade leading up to the Second World War, the remnants of the line, stretching between 68th and 105th Avenues, were mainly used to shuttle coal to the Rossdale power plant and pigs to Gainer’s slaughterhouse in the Mill Creek Ravine.
As was common practice, Canadian National, inheritors of the EY&P, had kept a nibble of track reaching toward Glenora when it tore up the line between Edmonton and Stony Plain. It was a useful little spur for turning trains coming out of the downtown rail yard, as well as a place to store surplus cars.
On Dec. 7th, 1941, Japanese pilots attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbour. Although Edmonton was more than 3,200 miles northeast of the site of the massacre, it suddenly became one of the most important cities in North America, at least from the point of view of military strategists. Within a year, a friendly invasion of more than 15,000 American soldiers and civilian support staff had stretched local infrastructure beyond its capacity.
The Yankees came to Edmonton for three reasons:
The northwest terminal of the Northern Alberta Railways system, Dawson Creek, was selected as “Mile 0” of the Alaska project. Trains could move equipment and materials to the starting point, but Edmonton’s Dunvegan Yards was not able to handle the load. The Americans needed a railhead of their own, and someone suggested the little stub of line poking into Glenora had potential.
The tracks, between 106th and 107th Avenues, were extended at least as far west as 145th Street, where Henderson’s Directory notes that an access road crossed the line, providing southern access to the maze of warehouses hastily built by the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps.
The same haste was used to build small homes on Westgrove’s plentiful vacant lots. A few examples of this emergency wartime housing remain, often surrounded by larger bungalows built before or after the war.
If you live in a 1940s house, there are very good odds that the original residents were an American family that had temporarily resettled in Edmonton while Daddy worked on the Alaska Highway project.
Perhaps, in a fanciful sense, the EY&P fulfilled its destiny by serving the builders of the Alaska Highway. The little railway with big ambitions eventually found a way to help people get to the Klondike – and beyond.
After the war, the railhead became, for a short time, an industrial area. However, because of the baby boom and migration fuelled by the oil discovery at Leduc, Edmonton needed people houses more than warehouses. The shops were recycled and so were the rails. Once and for all, trains disappeared from Grovenor.
If the new parts of the community – the bungalows north of 106th Avenue built less than 60 years ago – feel tacked on, indeed they were. Prewar Grovenor features majestic trees and roads that adhere to the grid system of planning. The extension offers large front yards, with looping crescents to dissuade short-cutting drivers.
The mismatched design is a legacy – of the Alaska Highway, the attack on Pearl Harbour and the dream shared by William Mackenzie and Donald Mann to build Canada’s second transcontinental railway system. That legacy is right here in Grovenor.
The name was certainly ambitious enough: the Edmonton, Yukon and Pacific Railway, chartered to snake through the Yellowhead Pass into B.C. Perhaps, in the event of another outbreak of gold fever, it would head north to the Klondike as well.
In 1907, as settlers started building houses along the MacKinnon Ravine, the first 30 kilometres or so of the EY&P were already operating: Strathcona to Edmonton to Stony Plains (the extra “s” eventually disappeared).
When the EY&P first train had crossed the Low Level Bridge on Oct. 20, 1902, it was an event of such magnitude that Mayor William Short declared a civic holiday.
Finally Edmonton was connected to the rest of the world by a more reliable form of transportation than steamships and stagecoaches. More importantly, it had secured a place on 20th century maps. In 1891, when the Calgary and Edmonton Railway dead-ended in Strathcona, it seemed like a matter of time before the new settlement swallowed up the town that had grown up on the north side of the river, around the old Hudson’s Bay Company Fort. Instead, 10 years after the first EY&P train, Edmonton annexed (or amalgamated with, to use the politically-correct term) Strathcona.
The route that first train took now makes for a lovely walk, especially on a fall afternoon. Start at the east side of the CPR rail yard. Between 68th and 69th Avenues, there’s a long grassy knoll that stretches all the way to the Mill Creek Ravine. (It’s an off-leash area for dogs now, so tread carefully.) The alignment through the ravine is preserved as a paved trail, and walking toward the river valley a hiker crosses four trestle bridges, reminders of the EY&P. The longest and most impressive is parallel to 76th Avenue.
Initially, the rails did not reach as far as Grovenor. Just getting across the river was good enough to start, so the EY&P put up a temporary station in Rossdale, northwest of the Low Level Bridge, and declared itself open for business. It was a frugal operation. When there was no money to buy coal, the engineer and fireman dug into a seam near the station hoping to find fuel for the tender. Construction standards had been exceedingly poor, which caused frequent derailments. For safety’s sake, trains crawled along at a maximum speed of 16 km/h.
At the end of November 1905, a second line reached Edmonton: the Canadian Northern Railway, from Winnipeg through Saskatoon, North Battleford and Fort Saskatchewan. As the CNoR and the EY&P shared the same ownership, under the direction of William Mackenzie and Donald Mann, linking the railways made sense. Malcolm MacCrimmon was given a contract to extend the EY&P up the north bank on the North Saskatchewan River. The line climbed over Victoria Park, wrapped along the east fork of the Groat Ravine and continued diagonally toward the CNoR yards, connecting near the Molson brewery.
In 1906, MacCrimmon started building westward, extending the EY&P on an alignment just a little bit north of today’s 106th Avenue, through areas now called Glenora, Grovenor, Canora, Britannia, Youngstown, Mayfield – and on to Stony Plains.
At the Edmonton Archives, early city maps show that the community of Westgrove was bounded by the railway to the north and the ravine to the south. The western city limit was 149th Street, where the independent town of Jasper Place took over jurisdiction. Curiously, to the east, Westgrove stretched all the way to 140th Street, beyond the current border of 142nd Street.
Stony Plains would turn out to be the end of the line for the EY&P. Out of money, Mackenzie and Mann lost the initiative to the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, which reached Edmonton from Wainwright in 1909 and kept building west to Jasper and eventually Prince Rupert. That year, on Apr. 23, the EY&P lost its independent corporate existence, becoming part of the CNoR.
When their finances improved, Mackenzie and Mann faced a choice: build from Stony Plains alongside the GTP line or take a more northerly route, through St. Albert, Onoway and Alberta Beach. This decision to explore virgin territory relegated the former EY&P to a spur, with three trains per week picking up grain from the Stony Plains elevator.
By 1923, both the CNoR and GTP were bankrupt and under direct federal government control. A new crown corporation, Canadian National Railways, consolidated duplicate lines: between Glenora and (now called) Stony Plain, the old EY&P right of way was abandoned, the rails removed.
The residents of Westgrove, now called Grovenor, would gladly have taken money from a fool willing to wager that someday boxcars would again pass through the community.
The Edmonton, Yukon and Pacific Railway had turned out to be a bit of a dud, stopping thousands of miles short of either destination. In the decade leading up to the Second World War, the remnants of the line, stretching between 68th and 105th Avenues, were mainly used to shuttle coal to the Rossdale power plant and pigs to Gainer’s slaughterhouse in the Mill Creek Ravine.
As was common practice, Canadian National, inheritors of the EY&P, had kept a nibble of track reaching toward Glenora when it tore up the line between Edmonton and Stony Plain. It was a useful little spur for turning trains coming out of the downtown rail yard, as well as a place to store surplus cars.
On Dec. 7th, 1941, Japanese pilots attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbour. Although Edmonton was more than 3,200 miles northeast of the site of the massacre, it suddenly became one of the most important cities in North America, at least from the point of view of military strategists. Within a year, a friendly invasion of more than 15,000 American soldiers and civilian support staff had stretched local infrastructure beyond its capacity.
The Yankees came to Edmonton for three reasons:
- Blatchford Field (later called the Municipal Airport) was the top aviation facility in the northern part of the continent. It would become the hub through which hundreds of planes would land, refuel and take off daily, bringing weapons and humanitarian aid to the Soviet Union.
- New sources of oil might be needed if the war started to go badly for the Allies and the prospects here seemed good.
- The North American defence plan assigned a high priority to building a road to Alaska, to prepare for the possibility of a Japanese incursion.
The northwest terminal of the Northern Alberta Railways system, Dawson Creek, was selected as “Mile 0” of the Alaska project. Trains could move equipment and materials to the starting point, but Edmonton’s Dunvegan Yards was not able to handle the load. The Americans needed a railhead of their own, and someone suggested the little stub of line poking into Glenora had potential.
The tracks, between 106th and 107th Avenues, were extended at least as far west as 145th Street, where Henderson’s Directory notes that an access road crossed the line, providing southern access to the maze of warehouses hastily built by the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps.
The same haste was used to build small homes on Westgrove’s plentiful vacant lots. A few examples of this emergency wartime housing remain, often surrounded by larger bungalows built before or after the war.
If you live in a 1940s house, there are very good odds that the original residents were an American family that had temporarily resettled in Edmonton while Daddy worked on the Alaska Highway project.
Perhaps, in a fanciful sense, the EY&P fulfilled its destiny by serving the builders of the Alaska Highway. The little railway with big ambitions eventually found a way to help people get to the Klondike – and beyond.
After the war, the railhead became, for a short time, an industrial area. However, because of the baby boom and migration fuelled by the oil discovery at Leduc, Edmonton needed people houses more than warehouses. The shops were recycled and so were the rails. Once and for all, trains disappeared from Grovenor.
If the new parts of the community – the bungalows north of 106th Avenue built less than 60 years ago – feel tacked on, indeed they were. Prewar Grovenor features majestic trees and roads that adhere to the grid system of planning. The extension offers large front yards, with looping crescents to dissuade short-cutting drivers.
The mismatched design is a legacy – of the Alaska Highway, the attack on Pearl Harbour and the dream shared by William Mackenzie and Donald Mann to build Canada’s second transcontinental railway system. That legacy is right here in Grovenor.