Schreiber and White River

• Flat land on which to build long railway yard tracks - to receive the trains and switch their cars.
• Adequate flat space for stations, locomotive and car shops, coaling towers, worker housing, 'rest & exercise' stockyards, and community buildings.
• Abundant fresh water for locomotives and people.
• These locations had to be at roughly 125 mile intervals from the established settlement of Fort William and other planned railway terminals farther to the east.

 

• Steam-powered ships could bring in rails, additional workers, food and supplies between winter freeze-ups.
• Construction was completed more quickly because shoreline building at many points could be started in both directions.
• Given the difficulty of blasting through granite, inland construction done only from the "end of track" would have probably run afoul of the company's guarantees to the government to complete the line on schedule.
• However, powerful Lake Superior storms quickly washed away the broken granite "fills" for the roadbed along the shore if they weren't built carefully.

White River: Home away from home

This early photograph is from "White River - 100 Years, Pictorial History" by Mary Houston.
The caption reads:
"First CPR company houses and lodging house built on the river bank with view of rail yard and station.
Later these houses were moved across the tracks to the east end of town which became known as 'Little England'
Photo: Courtesy M. Leadbeater"

The photo may be from around 1890.

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The Chief Train Dispatcher and six train dispatchers were at White River along with the Division Superintendent.
There was an Assistant Superintendent at Chapleau and a Trainmaster at Schreiber.


The enlarged White River station photographed in 1907.
Division offices and the dispatchers were upstairs.
The train order and register office was at the far end.

District No. 1 of the Lake Superior Division ran from Chalk River to Cartier, both in Ontario, and included the line to Sault Ste Marie and the US.

White River was probably chosen as the administrative centre because it was in the geographical centre of District No 2. However, The White River - which you can see in the first photo above - has a history of sometimes flooding during the spring thaw. It seems likely that this problem and the lack of physical space to expand caused the Division Headquarters to move to Schreiber.

Schreiber received a fancy new station around 1924 and this was likely co-incident with the change ... or not ... definitely one or the other.

 

In the earlier days of White River, the CPR built the following:

• Locomotive and car shops and a passenger station with business offices.
• A coaling facility and water tank.
  
• Worker housing and a CPR rooming house.
• A building for storage of block ice cut in the winter - which was used for freight car ice bunker refilling, and likely some local refrigeration during the summer.
• Stock pens to feed and exercise entire trains of live cattle coming east for slaughter (before reliable refrigeration and the ability to freeze meat for transport). Other livestock, such as sheep and horses, was also sent across the country.

In the late 1970s, loaded stock cars were still coming east, marshalled at the headend of some of our freights. However, the stock pens were demolished in 1976 because the Winnipeg to Toronto journey could be made without cattle rest stops within the federally required 40 hour period. The pens were located where it says "First Ck" on the map, by Little Lake.

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When in White River, stay at ...


White River once had a YMCA which served as a pleasant centre for townspeople to meet socially and a place for visitors to stay. Its main function was providing rest facilities for off duty crews and junior railway personnel from out of town. It burned down in the 1950s. On the same location, CP built a bunkhouse where we slept and/or waited until our trains arrived. It is located at the bottom tip of the red shaded area of the map.

The original CPR bunkhouse is the brown building, and we slept behind in the green "portables".

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In the Old Days ...

Before the 1960s (approximately) when particular vans (cabooses) were assigned to particular conductors ... the conductor and the two brakemen slept on wooden benches - with mattresses and bedding - in the van when off duty and away from home. But the engine crew - the engineer and fireman - slept in the brown building above when off duty and away from home.

Consider a single typical eastbound freight running from Winnipeg to Montreal ...
Ten (5 + 5) crew members are required to move it from Schreiber to Chapleau.

At White River, the Schreiber crew rests and will return home to Schreiber on some other train.
At White River, a rested Chapleau crew will take over this particular freight, thus returning home to Chapleau.

Freight Train runs ... Schreiber to White River Arriving operating crew lives in Schreiber	Freight Train runs ... White River to Chapleau Departing operating crew lives in Chapleau
Engine crew sleeps in White River bunkhouse Engineer Fireman	Engine crew sleeps in White River bunkhouse Engineer Fireman
Train crew sleeps in van Headend brakeman (rides on engine) Tailend brakeman Conductor	Train crew sleeps in van Headend brakeman (rides on engine) Tailend brakeman Conductor

Remember this was typical in the days of steam before 1960.

In large terminals - not necessarily White River - conductors put special markers on top of their van cupolas to make their van easy to spot.
... like markers on auto radio aerials in crowded parking lots today.



Inside a steam-era caboose on an American road with the train crew - washing dishes.

Later in history ...
when the van was left attached to the through freight train
and not assigned to the conductor living in Schreiber or Chapleau ...
the conductors and brakeman bunked in with the engine crew at the enlarged bunkhouse.

A big happy family.

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Getting back to the White River bunkhouse in 1977 ...

Each room had its own desk, chair and bed. The place had showers, cooking facilities and satellite TV.

On arrival, you simply wrote your name beside any room number on the chalkboard where the 'name space' was blank.

When the crew callers came for us, they had four names (diesel era) for the ordered train. They looked for your name ... and came to your room if you weren't in the 'common room' watching the Peter Gzowski talk show on CBC TV.

At your room, the crew caller would:

• Go to your room and bang on the door.
• Immediately open the door.
• Immediately turn on the light and walk right in.
• Say something like "Gagnon, extra west at 0300".
• Squint at you for a second to satisfy themselves you were past the point of going back to sleep.
• Leave, closing the door and leaving the light on.
  

You then got ready and reported to the station to take your westbound freight train back to Schreiber at 3 AM.

 

Here is White River in the 1970s. The Trans-Canada Highway runs across the top of the town on this postcard and you can see the souvenir shops and services which sprang up in the 1960s to sell those "coldest spot in Canada" T-shirts to tourists. You can also imagine that when The White River (lower left and bottom) flooded there would be wet basements all around.

Looking back from the dome car on the westbound Canadian in 1984, you can see the station and offices to the left of our track, then the yard, and the water and fuel facilities to the right. At this point, White River was losing its ability to repair locomotives and cars to larger facilities such as Thunder Bay.

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In the White River yard office

In researching this piece, I was reminded of one of the nicest experiences I had during my Lake Superior effort. For a short while I worked as an "intern" at the White River yard office with the night shift machine operator Bob Mura. He taught me how to work on the old IBM teletypes - which produced a punched tape record of a train's cars (a train consist). These long tapes were wrapped in a figure-eight motion around your thumb and pinkie finger and hung up on pegs to be fed into the machines for later transmission to Montreal to update their car control computer. Today, you could probably record the data from a room full of these primitive "storage media" on a single CD-ROM.

Quoting a 1938 reference: "The usual speed of transmitters on railroad circuits is about 6 pulses per second.
This means that about 360 characters will be sent per minute."

(This 6 Hertz 'processor speed' sounds about right as I remember the machines)

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One cold dark winter night, the powerful White River yard office radio crackled with an engineer's call that their freight had just put fifty ("five nought") cars in the bush to the east of White River. "Man, that's railroading!!" said Bob.

Whenever there was a derailment, the trains would all cram into terminals like White River to wait for hours or days until the line could be reopened. Stranded train crews at the bunkhouse were sometimes called for duty just to refuel the diesel-powered refrigeration units of similarly stranded semi-trailers and shipping containers travelling on flatcars.

Eddie Doyon's retirement at White River station.
Photo courtesy of Jason Cottom

Edna & Ed Doyon, R.J. Mura (dark glasses), Bill Card, Charlie Linklater, Ernie Gionet, Tommy Hogan, Mac McLeod, Irvin Baziuk, Bob Roffey.

I am very grateful to Bob Mura's grandson for reading my memories of White River, contacting me, and sending this photograph (April 2009).
The event shown dates back about 30 years and I recognize many of the faces.
I think the facial expressions here communicate a lot to you about my experiences in White River.

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Bob Mura taught me how to use the IBM teletypes during the night shifts.
Assistant Superintendent Tees had suggested I could stay at the bunkhouse during the training.
I was preparing for a summer relief vacancy at a station to the east.

Bob was a good patient teacher ...
even when the Montreal computer repeatedly
rejected the train consist tapes I had typed off-line
and then submitted on a live machine.

He explained to me that the running trades required a 'different kind of cat' ...
and that life on the road could be very demanding, with significant stress and time away from home.
In our short time together, he certainly made me feel much better about some decisions I had made.

Eddie's Retirement wasn't the only 'end of career event' which Bob attended.

I departed White River (and CP Rail) for eastern Ontario on Train Number 2 in the middle of the night.
It was a clear and cold, and the patches of snow remaining on the hard asphalt platform squeaked underfoot.
Bob came out with me in his shirt-sleeves to see me off ... and waited there with the station lights behind him as I boarded.

I'll always remember his friendliness and support during those last few days.


*  *  *



from L.C. Gagnon

A 2009 scan of a just-discovered 1980 photocopy of a 1958 CPR Spanner magazine.
You can see the figure-8 wound tape consists - usually one for each train - on the varnished wood pegboard.
And there's Bob at the centre of the photograph.

[After seeing this photo, Jason Cottom advised me that P.E. Linklater is R.J. Mura's father-in-law ...
Many railroaders had nicknames and Yardmaster Linklater was known as 'Hot Cakes'.
If you are doing the math at home ... this is a photo of Jason's Grandfather and Great Grandfather]




"Clarence Cottom beside engine 2228 that held the punch bowl for his retirement party.
Photo: Courtesy J. Dillabough"

This is one of my favourite photos from Mary Houston's book
and I have previously posted it as part of other White River pages.

It shows Jason's other grandfather.

Sometimes cakes or other mementos were decorated with the locomotive number of a retiree's last run.
Here is a 1932 snapshot of another Angus Shops built engine of the same class as Clarence Cottom's 'last run'.

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"Flood - May, 1936. Clem Cowan and Mary Whent paddling on Winnipeg Street"

It must have been quite a project to pull together, safeguard, sort, select, caption, reproduce, and return
a collection of photos to represent White River's 100 years of history in 1985.

Mary Houston (shown here as a teenager) and the citizens of White River
have made a great contribution to the understanding of
'the human experience' of railroading and living together
in a small close-knit CPR community from its earliest days.

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Schreiber: Home

My 'home terminal' in 1977


In Schreiber, there is an Ontario historic plaque which reads:

"This community, originally known as Isbester's Landing, was named in 1885 after Collingwood G. Schreiber. Born at Bradwell Lodge, near Colchester, England, Schreiber emigrated to Canada West in 1852. His training in England as a civil engineer enabled him to play a significant role as a field surveyor and administrator in Canada's era of railway expansion. Schreiber was associated with the Northern Railway between 1860-1864 and the International between 1868-1875 before succeeding Sandford Fleming in 1880 as Engineer-in-Chief of the Canadian Pacific. Schreiber retained this position until 1892 when he became deputy minister of the federal Department of Railways and Canals. He was knighted in 1916 for his public services."

Photo from Rolly Martin

James Isbester after whom Isbester's Landing (later 'Schreiber') was named.
He was a contractor for key parts of the Lake Superior line -
particularly along the granite shoreline east of Schreiber.

James Isbester 1840-1899 (dates approximate) Born: Orkney Islands and came to Canada as a youngster when his family settled near Woodstock. As a young man, worked as a mechanical engineer on the Great Western Railway (Canada). Began contracting experience in 1869, building a portion of the Rimouski Bridge under Alexander Macdonald. Subcontractor on the Intercolonial Railway. Built Section B of the CPR in partnership with Manning and Macdonald - along the north shore of Lake Superior. Contracted with R.G. Reid (of the Newfoundland Railway) on the Cape Breton extension of the Intercolonial Railway. Completed a contract on the Crow's Nest Pass in the spring of 1899. Died of complications from diabetes during a trip to inspect a contract in the Rainy River district. 'Ardent Conservative', Presbyterian, and 'warm personal friend' of Sir John A. Macdonald. From the text of an obituary supplied by Brian Westhouse, December 2005

It is quite possible that Isbester's contract included this bridge.
The Little Pic River bridge, mileage 81 Heron Bay Sub,
has 'always' had a 30mph slow order due to grades and curvature.

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Schreiber before I went on brake.
Where do we start with all the interesting details?

This is looking 'timetable east' ... so going away along the track will take you to White River. The date is probably 1890-1900. At this point the main railway buildings were north of the yard. It is possible, at this time, that there were stockyards to the south of the yard near where the circa 1924 station currently is.

There is a brakeman on the roofwalk at the three livestock cars just ahead of the conductor's van.

At the edge of civilization at the rear of the photo ... left to right ... shop (?) ... passenger station and freight shed ... food and boarding facilities (?) ... ice house (?).

Rough as it is, this photo seems to look timetable west. Stock pens are in use roughly where the 1924 station stands today.
The station and buildings in the 'trestle photo' above are probably beyond the water tower in this view.

As the map below shows, Schreiber yard is curved in between walls of hills, with a creek and gorge at the west end.

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"The Strike" referred to above was the 50,000 worker Pullman Strike in Chicago which had been called by Eugene V. Debs and the American Railway Union because sleeping car workers' wages had been cut 25% and their union representatives fired. An injunction was obtained by the U.S. attorney general (who also happened to be a director on two railroad boards), and U.S. President Cleveland sent in troops to enforce the injunction (34 strikers dead, hundreds of railway cars burned by strikers) on July 4, 1894.

This violence occurred a week or so before the newspapers would have reached Schreiber if they had not all 'been disposed of' from CPR train Number 2 as recorded above. The railways were BIG business and you didn't fool around with them. CPR officials had no interest in keeping local workers in a company town up to date on strikes on other railways.

Speaking of officials ... from the same edition :

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Schreiber's Italian Community

Immigrants from many countries and many other parts of Canada have come to call Schreiber home over the years. The most noted group all had an interesting common background.

Around 1905, Cosimo Figliomeni arrived in Schreiber from Siderno, Italy, beginning a sequence of 'chain' migration of families from Siderno to Schreiber. Put simply, 'chain migration' is knowing someone who can help you find a place to live and help you get a job - then you help someone you know, etc.

Back then, the railway was a very labour intensive business. It is hard to imagine how it could have functioned without the contribution of newcomers to Canada who often took on unpleasant, dangerous, lonely and demanding jobs to become established in this sometimes harsh and challenging country.

All year, the track would need to be patrolled and maintained with heavy repairs being performed during the summer. This would employ hundreds of workers on the Division.

In winter, with the roadbed frozen, shimming would be performed to correct minor track defects. Cold and brittle rails breaking under the pounding of trains would need to be replaced. Snowstorms would bring a great demand for switch cleaning to keep the yards and sidings functioning. Slides of rock, snow, and ice would need to be cleared. Inevitably, trains suddenly coming into contact with winter track defects would require labour to clear derailments and rebuild the track.

White River yard switch cleaning in the 1930s - from 'Pictorial History'

To maintain safety, trackwalkers were used in a number of lonely areas on the line which were likely to be struck by rock and snow slides. The waves and ice of Lake Superior storms could also attack the right of way. These workers would be out in all hours, and in all weather, to inspect the track and signal trains that it was safe to proceed if all was well. This was particularly important before the passage of a passenger train.

Another lonely job would be to maintain the water tanks used to refill steam locomotive tenders. All year, the water pumps to fill the tanks would need to be operated. During the winter, the fires in heaters at the base of the tanks would also need to be maintained to keep the tanks from freezing.

Spring thaw, heavy rain and beaver dam flooding repairs; ditch and culvert maintenance; brush clearing; bridge and building maintenance; locomotive servicing and car repairs; inspecting journals and topping them up with oil; hauling blocks of cooling ice; maintaining kerosene markers and switchlamps ... there seems to be no end to the list of jobs the railway needed done.

Today, descendants of the immigrants from Siderno are said to make up half of the population of Schreiber.

To understand the history of Schreiber is to understand the contribution of those who worked under the most difficult and dangerous conditions to keep the trains rolling.

The message mailed to Red Deer Alberta reads:

"This is pretty true to life.
Gee I think all the snow in the world is here,
and more to come and it's cold."

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Schreiber Grows and Changes

Begun in the 1930s, the Trans-Canada Highway was not completed in the region as a through road until 1960. So the early development of both Schreiber and White River was centred around the railway station and yards, beginning with the CPR's completion in 1885.

• Water transportation was minimal because neither had good harbours on Lake Superior.
• There were few roads and no through roads in the early years.
  
• There were few motor vehicles then.
  
• The towns existed only for the railway as single industry towns.

The railway provided Schreiber with:

• Some company housing, particularly worker dormitories and houses for officials who were transferred to Schreiber.
• Waterworks.
• Coal oil street lighting and eventually a diesel motor generated electrical system in 1936.
• Telegraph service with the outside world with some telephones in the late 1930s.

Social services were provided mainly by the churches. The YMCA was one place where some community events were held and it was the place where travellers and transferred or "bumped" railway workers could get a room. Retail stores, their goods transported in by the railway, also became established.


My brother obtained the following photocopies of diagrams for me years ago. They show the plans for the proposed station at Schreiber, dated 1924. They're not presented because they are beautiful ... but because I think others should have and preserve the history of the CPR line north of Superior. It was this building which made Schreiber the headquarters for the division. With this came the salaried positions which - I was told in 1977 - made Schreiber 'the town with the highest per capita income in Ontario'.

With the completion and opening of the Trans-Canada Highway from Sault Ste Marie to the lakehead in September 1960, the Schreiber I knew evolved.
To me, the most memorable features of Schreiber were:

• The friendliness of the people - everyone was very helpful to a teenager arriving in town to 'go on brake'.
• The importance of the railway to Schreiber and vice versa (i.e. the division offices and the shops to repair rolling stock).
• The silence of the town and the height of the snowbanks - as I walked to work in the middle of the night in a snowstorm.

With the opening of the Trans-Canada, 'getting over the road' took on a new meaning.
Back in these days professional salaries were probably around $1000 per year.
Old cars are always interesting, but also take note of the local telephone exchange in this 1965 flyer.

This is the part of Schreiber which is north of the railway tracks. You can see the gently rolling sea of forested granite sliced by the Trans-Canada. In the late 1970s and the 1980s, perhaps more emphasis was put on the Trans-Canada for Schreiber's future. This postcard from that time only shows a few stub tracks and a couple of white roundhouse stalls as evidence of the town's heritage.

About 500 people were employed by CP Rail when I worked there in the late 1970s. About 120 more were employed by the expanding Kimberly-Clark mill in nearby Terrace Bay and there was a housing crunch in Schreiber as construction workers crowded in to every available lodging.

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Schreiber - a final trip back through time

The dispatchers, locomotive and car shops, division offices, and half of the running trades employees (the trainmen) are no longer to be found in Schreiber. Today, the Schreiber station stands as a reminder of the thousands of railroaders who called Schreiber home over the years.

Schreiber station in the 1980s.

Travelling back, here is a postcard from sometime in the mid-1960s. The railway is prominent in the postcard photo by Harry R. Oakman of Peterborough. A long summertime Train Number 1 with three locomotives is changing crews at Schreiber station. The roundhouse is gone, but the yard is full of paper cars and the car shop is in business.

1960s

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Let's go back to the late 1930s. There is no Trans-Canada. There is no through road featured in the next postcard.

The town is centred around the railway facilities and buildings. We see the roundhouse with its covered turntable (no shovelling snow out of the pit) and the left edge of the postcard is smudged with coal smoke. Company-built buildings stand out.

The westbound mainline - the sole reliable link between eastern and western Canada for the first 30 years of the CPR - quickly disappears among the forested granite hills.

 

1930s

Schreiber today is a thoroughly modern town.
But in this photo you can catch a glimpse of its origin.

In the year 2010, it will be 125 years
since the first of thousands of Schreiber running trades employees started
pulling themselves up into the cabs of waiting CPR locomotives,
and swinging themselves up onto the steps of passing CPR vans.

Today, they continue to provide a link to Schreiber's beginnings.

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