12 March 2011

The Glen Yard's Glorious Era

Montreal Quebec - The construction crews digging the foundations of the McGill University Health Centre's new teaching hospital have pretty well obliterated all traces of what was once one of Montreal's most important pieces of railway infrastructures.
 
In its day, the Glen Yard serviced the locomotives and cars of the Canadian Pacific Railway's passenger fleet, but the tracks and roundhouses of that era are long gone, replaced by a forest of soaring construction cranes.
 
The Glen got is name from homesick Scots who settled in the west-end village of Cote St. Antoine in the 1880s.
 
To them, the terrain resembled a Scottish glen, with its narrow valley and river course leading from the upper central plateau, down the escarpment to the village of St. Henri.
 
In those days, the residents of Cote St. Antoine had no rail connection of their own and used a footpath that followed a stream down the hill to reach the Montreal City Passenger Railway where Home Depot is located today.
 
The CPR reached Montreal in 1882.
 
Its terminal was the Dalhousie Square Station on Berri St. in what we now call Old Montreal.
 
While this location provided good access to the Port of Montreal, it was not ideally suited to passenger operations, especially those to the west.
 
Westbound trains took a circuitous route up Hochelaga Hill, through Mile End and Outremont, before turning west near Ville St. Pierre.
 
The CPR, through its rights and franchises with other railway companies acquired land to secure a right-of-way from Montreal Junction (Montreal West) to the west side of downtown Montreal.
 
When Windsor Station opened for regular service with four tracks on 4 Feb 1889, the first train out was the Day Express to Boston.
 
At first, a wooden trestle carried the tracks over Glen Road but this was later replaced with the impressive stone arch bridge that stands to this day.
 
In 1893 Cote St. Antoine finally got its first railway stop, and in 1898 (two years after the village had changed its name to Westmount), it got its first proper station.
 
In 1907, Westmount got a new and improved station, the one that still stands today, although it has been boarded up for years.
 
To service the steam locomotives and wooden passenger cars of the day, the CPR built a facility just west of Windsor Station between Mountain and Lucien L'Allier Streets.
 
It had a turntable and a 12-stall engine house on the north side of the main line and a coach-storage yard on the south side.
 
But the railway soon outgrew these cramped quarters.
 
It needed more land.
 
But where to get it and at what cost?
 
Rumours that the CPR was looking for land would drive up prices, land speculation is nothing new, so it appears that in 1903 the CPR contracted an inconspicuous party to do the buying and in 1904 the railway revealed it had purchased land in Westmount to build its new rail servicing facility.
 
The Glen Yard, bounded by Decarie Blvd. on the west, St. Jacques St. on the south, Glen Road on the east, and the CPR main line on the north, was born.
 
Work got underway in earnest in 1904.
 
Tons of dry landfill were poured onto the site to create an artificial plateau.
 
Fill depth varied from two to 15 metres.
 
The CPR built an 18-stall roundhouse (six more stalls added later) and boiler house (for site heating), as well as a stores department, a refrigerator plant, a cold storage building, a repair shop, a bunkhouse, and separate facilities to store oil and acetylene.
 
Railway infrastructure consisted of a turntable, a 200 ton capacity coal plant with chutes, a sand house, a 76-track yard, and a dual track loop around the outer perimeter of the property to turn large engines and entire trains.
 
In 1951 CPR's Place Viger station was closed, and all passenger operations moved to Windsor Station.
 
This brought an additional load onto the Glen Yard requiring yet another expansion.
 
The Glen Yard Extension was constructed on the south side of the CPR main line just west of Cavendish Blvd.
 
This relieved the passenger-car congestion.
 
Engine servicing remained at the Glen Yard.
 
At its peak, the Glen Yard received and dispatched up to 86 trains a day, it was a beehive of activity.
 
Trains were controlled from the Westmount control tower, first an elevated wooden one, it was replaced by a brick tower in 1923.
 
The late 1950s saw a marked change in railroading in Canada.
 
Diesel locomotives were replacing steam at an accelerated rate, and by 1960 the steam locomotive was retired from regular service on both CPR and CNR.
 
The dismantling of the Glen roundhouse was underway, bit by bit, as diesel locomotives were now being maintained at the St. Luc Yard.
 
A shop was erected to service the Budd self-propelled diesel cars that were introduced in the early 1950s.
 
Main line passenger trains declined through the 1960s and '70s, VIA Rail Canada took over passenger operations in Canada in 1978.
 
The Glen was relegated to servicing the CPR's commuter rail fleet.
 
Ownership of this fleet changed twice finally being acquired by the Agence Metropolitane de Transport in 1996.
 
In 1998 the McGill University Health Centre bought the 43-acre site from the CPR for $23 million on which it would built its new teaching hospital.
 
The project was approved by the Quebec government in 2003, the Glen Yard closed as a rail servicing facility on 8 Oct 2004.
 
The AMT had constructed a new commuter car servicing facility at Sortin, between Montreal West and Lachine.
 
The CPR donated a quantity of tracks and switches from the Glen Yard to Exporail to build its new 12-track access yard to service the Angus Pavilion which opened in 2003.
 
Special thanks to Michael Leduc who researched this topic for his book "The Glen".
 
Peter Murphy - vice president of the Canadian Railroad Historical Association which owns and operates Exporail, the Canadian Railway Museum in Delson/St. Constant.