Schreiber and White River

Much has been written about Fort William, Port Arthur and the current city of Thunder Bay. The Schreiber to Thunder Bay run over the Nipigon Subdivision was never as interesting to me as the "East End". My favourite trips were between Schreiber and White River through the wilderness of the Heron Bay Subdivision. On the highway signs of the time, Schreiber had a population of 2000 and White River had a population of 1200. With further streamlining of railway operations in the area, both of these towns are a little less crowded than they were in the late 1970s.

How did these little railway towns start?

In the late 1800s, several surveys were run through the country north of Lake Superior, as politicians were musing about an all Canadian railway route to unite "the east" with the tiny colony of British Columbia. The proposed railway, and settlement of the land along its route, would help ensure that the traditional Hudson's Bay Company lands and the rest of "the west" did not become part of the United States.

Some very interesting books were written at this time about how to organize railway surveying expeditions into the wild. Pack horses, dried food (hunting was useless as a source of food), simple manual instruments, and significant backwoods skills to survive and survey in the middle of nowhere were required. There were no warm clothes and tents made out of synthetic fibres, no cell phones, no GPS, no police, no hospitals, no doctors. There was only the occasional fur trading post to provide any needed help. Serious injury or starvation could change your plans for the rest of your life pretty quickly.

The job was to locate a nearly flat railway line as economically as possible. This was difficult because there were only hundreds of miles of rounded granite mountains, lakes, and swamps to build through. The best steam locomotives of the day could run about 125 miles before they needed more coal and fresh crews. So, along the north shore of Lake Superior, the railway builders needed to establish at least two townsites (called "division points") which met the following criteria:
map showing the Canadian Pacific Railway north of Lake Superior

So Fort William, Schreiber (centre of map) and White River (at right) became the "railway towns" for this region.
 

Building along the shore of Lake Superior in 1883-1885 was more effective than building inland:


White River: Home away from home

Dr. W.G. Houston was White River's physician from 1933 until his death in 1966. In 1985, the centennial of White River and the railway line, his wife Mary Houston put together a wonderful, comprehensive pictorial history of White River. Using old photographs shared by White River's citizens, it shows all aspects of community life in the little railway town from its very beginnings. Most of the following information on White River's development comes from her book.

Mary Houston passed away in December 2005 at the age of 86 having lived all of her life in White River.

There are at least two points she would want me to bring to your attention.

First of all, CPR records show it was NEVER officially named "Snowdrift" - always White River. (In 1937, a record 13.1 feet of snow fell there.)

More importantly, White River was long advertised as "the coldest spot in Canada " at -72 degrees Fahrenheit. This is completely false because that reading came from a shattered thermometer. The lowest temperature recorded was -61.2 degrees F on January 23, 1935 and this is proven in her book through the use of official weather records.

I'd like to add that the title should be "the coldest spot in Canada, which provided daily telegraph reports of its temperatures, back then, which were regularly published in newspapers ". This doesn't fit on a souvenir T-shirt, though.

White River is where we waited for our turn to work the next train back home to Schreiber. As you can tell, the land quite flat and it is the meandering White River that flows right by the yard and shops. There was limited room for railway expansion and at least twice, in May 1936 and May 1979, the White River flooded the town.

map of White River Ontario  

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

White River once had a YMCA which served as a pleasant place for townspeople to meet socially and a place for visitors to stay. 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 at the bottom tip of the red shaded area of the map.

White River CPR bunkhouse

 
The original CPR bunkhouse is the brown building, and we slept behind in the green "portables". 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 untaken room number on the blackboard used to call crews. When the crew caller came from the White River yard office, they would:
You then got ready and reported to the station to take your westbound freight train back to Schreiber at 3 AM.

White River Ontario in the 1970s  

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.

CP Rail White River Ontario railway yard looking east

  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.

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 low density floppy disc.

One cold dark winter night, the 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.

Mary Houston's book shows a picture of Bob Mura congratulating Eddie Doyon on the day of his retirement from CP Rail. This kind of activity would be as typical as pounding away at a teletype for Bob. He was certainly one of the kindest of all those friendly people I met north of Superior.



Schreiber: Home

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


Sir Collingwood Schreiber 1831-1918
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.

You can pronounce his name any way you like, but the name of the town is pronounced "SKRI ber" by residents and CPR railroaders across Canada ... Can you say shibboleth?

During railway construction, nearby Rossport and Jackfish harbours would have been more important than Schreiber for heavy supply. As you can see from this map from the 1980s, Schreiber is isolated from Lake Superior, except for the trail down to Schreiber Beach. The contour lines show that the town and its facilities are ringed by high hills and that the yard tracks had to be bent around these hills to be located on relatively flat land. The blue squares are 1000 metres across.

map: Schreiber Ontario

Schreiber existed for the railway, but gradually a more balanced community developed. Here is a Schreiber news column from the Fort William Journal of July 18, 1894 - nine years after the line was completed.

Fort William Journal July 18, 1894

"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 up to date on strikes on other railways.

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.

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. One of the trainmen who trained me was Dom Figliomeni and he now works on the right side of the locomotive cab.

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.

Schreiber Grows and Changes

At times in the past, Chapleau and White River had administrative responsibility for this district of the CPR. Most references agree that Schreiber became headquarters for the 555 mile Schreiber Division around 1930, with construction of the new, large station which housed the superintendent, dispatchers, and other staff for the division.

Begun in the 1930s, the Trans-Canada Highway was not completed in the region as a through road until around 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 no roads then.
  • There were no automobiles 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.


With the completion of the Trans-Canada Highway around 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
Schreiber Ontario and the Trans-Canada

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.

Schreiber's Past and Future

Since then, 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 Ontario CP Rail station 1980s
Schreiber station in the 1980s.

Travelling back in time, 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.

Schreiber Ontario 1960s

Let's go back to perhaps the late 1940s. 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.

Schreiber Ontario in the late 1940s

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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