Burnaby British Columbia - After more than 10 years of research, the Vorce tram station at Burnaby Village Museum may finally return to its original look.
 
But first, Burnaby council will have to approve the station's proposed relocation next to the tram barn which is currently being built at the museum to house the restored Interurban 1223 car. A report on the relocation proposal will be presented at the Community Heritage Commission meeting tonight (Thursday).
 
The fact city staff now know what the station originally looked like was the culmination of years of research, said City of Burnaby heritage planner Jim Wolf.
 
Built in 1911, the station was named Vorce, a misspelling of the name of B.C. Electric Railway Company's construction engineer, C.B. Vorse. For several decades it sat at the foot of Nursery Street, south of Burnaby Lake, and served the Burnaby Lake Interurban line, along what is now Highway 1.
 
In 1953, when the Interurban was closed, Aynsley Lubbock hitched a horse team to the structure and dragged it to his nearby farm at Canada Way and Haszard Street where he used it as a granary shed, Wolf said.
 
It wasn't until 1977, when the Lubbock farm was being demolished and Burnaby Village Museum staff went to have a look that Lubbock pointed out the old tram station. It was then moved to the museum site where it sat next to the main entrance for many years until the entrance was moved.
 
"The building always looked a little odd, especially to my eye," said Wolf. "I knew it was wrong but we didn't have any historical evidence or proof of exactly what the building looked like."
 
About 10 years ago, Wolf started looking for the building's original plans, scouring the B.C. Electric Railway archives at the University of B.C., to no avail. During that time, Burnaby's city archives started to get organized. While it includes material dating back to the 1890s, up to that point it hadn't been catalogued.
 
City archivist Arilea Sill has been "making tremendous progress on going through all the city's files and lo and behold, out of one of those files, turned up the original agreement with the B.C. Electric company for the Burnaby Lake line," Wolf said.
 
Assistant museum programmer Lynda Orr discovered the agreement last spring, Wolf said, and attached to it was the station design plans. "They were sitting right under our nose, locked away in the archives... That was pretty exciting."
 
To make sure these drawings were what the Vorce station looked like, Wolf and museum conservator Elisabeth Czerwinski "started to crawl all over that building looking for the evidence and sure enough we could see where, probably in the 1930s or '40s, they had cut off all of the original passenger shelter extensions and they'd taken out the windows and the doors, all of the things that made the Vorce tram station the interesting little railroad station that it was."
 
The line itself was only built due to political pressure from Burnaby council.
 
"Transit even in 1911 was a big, hot political issue," he said. "Burnaby had a lot of power under the existing regulations."
 
B.C. Electric Railway, a private operator, built the money-losing line in 1911, through what was mostly bush, after Burnaby council threatened to allow another private operator to come in and do it, creating competition for what was essentially a monopoly. The same deal also resulted in a streetcar line opening in North Burnaby by 1914.
 
The Burnaby Lake line "was a bit of a gamble but they got a whole bunch of land concessions from all of the owners along the way to create this little electric rail line in the middle of the woods," Wolf said.
 
The line itself was not officially a B.C. Electric company as a "ghost company," the Vancouver Fraser Valley and Southern Railway Company, was created under federal legislation to run it. As a railway company, it had access to the legal and tax advantages available in the federal Dominion Railway Act.
 
The act itself also set out standardized designs for railroad stations which is why the original Vorce station looked so different than it does today.
 
Back then, the building had four walls, with windows and a door, and even an electric heater inside, with a covered platform extending from it, just like a mini railroad station.
 
"It was the job of the first line through to light all the little heaters in all the little stations so they would be warm for the passengers that would come down and wait for the trams," he said.
 
"We had all these little details that we never knew until we found the plans and exactly what they looked like."
 
Wolf believes the changes were made to save money. Everything that made the buildings interesting also required a lot of maintenance, particularly in light of vandalism causing windows to be broken regularly.
 
So an entire wall and the covered platform was removed, as were all the little details. Czerwinski said she suspected for years something wasn't right with the building but couldn't put her finger on it.
 
When the museum installed a new roof in 1994, she recalled, she saw brightly painted red wood underneath. She figured it was simply from a repair of wood rot.
 
But she also noticed the building was not structurally sound. Without that fourth wall, it "started to twist a lot," causing the museum to do some stabilizing work and build a platform out front.
 
Once the plans were discovered, she said, they started to notice other quirks, like places where windows were filled in and graffiti carved in the walls upside down. The latter was a telltale sign that boards had been moved around, likely during the conversion when material was salvaged and reused.
 
When the Interurban system was shut down, B.C. Electric either tore or burnt down almost all the stations. The Sullivan Station got hauled off the line and used as a chicken coop, sustaining so much rot it had to be completely rebuilt, Wolf said. That makes the Vorce station one of the very few survivors, and likely the best preserved, giving it significant heritage value.
 
It's the last remaining tram station in Burnaby and soon, with council's approval, it may return to its original context, in front of the tram barn and a stretch of track on which Interurban 1223 will be set out for display in good weather.
 
While the move of the station is already part of the tram barn budget, funding for the restoration to its original design will still have to be secured, said Czerwinski.
 
The tram barn is scheduled for completion by the end of the year.
 
Author unknown.