On the RailsMBSK Facebook group, Chris C asked when the last passenger train served Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan. Naturally, I leapt to my timetable collection for the answer.
I don’t have a lot of physical passenger timetables; I collect employee timetables “ETT” for the most part. The older ETT have some passenger train information in them but it is not always complete. The passenger timetable is the authoritative source.
Fortunately, I have a large collection of PDFs of CN and CP passenger timetables, scanned by various people over the years and handed back and forth in ZIP files and USB drives. I was amused to see a timetable that I scanned and put on my web site come back to me as part of one of these collections.
Anyway, back to Fort Qu’Appelle. This is in the heart of the Qu’Appelle River valley, between Regina and Melville, SK. The rail line through there is the only direct rail connection between those two communities but it is not a main line.
The map above shows the area in 1962, with Fort Qu’Appelle highlighted in red for your viewing pleasure.
I dug back through public timetables, and this is the last mention of passenger service between Regina and Melville, from the April 29, 1962 public timetable, in table #82.
A train departed twice a week from “North Regina”, taking 5 hours 15 minutes to travel the 96.3 miles to Melville – an average speed of 18.3 MPH. Not speedy!
The train is shown as an “M” train meaning a mixed train – a passenger car tacked onto a freight train that would wander up and down the line, picking up and setting off freight cars. It wasn’t a speedy way to travel but that’s all that CN grudgingly offered on that line in 1962.
There was no station at North Regina – that was the CN yard. In order to take the mixed train to Melville, you’d have to go into the freight yard and get on the train there. Not very convenient…
Looking at the departure times, it’s interesting that M297 and M298 departed each end at about the same time (just after 8 AM), and arrived at 1:25 PM at the other end of the subdivision. The bold type shows scheduled meeting times where the two trains should expect to meet the other one.
Table 82 quietly disappeared from the October 28, 1962 public timetable, as did #84 (Saskatoon – Tichfield – Beechy) and likely a bunch of other mixed trains.
In 1962 CN was more interested in showing its cool diesel locomotives, ships, hotels and vacation destinations. Remember that the CN logo was still very new in 1962!
Dialing the time machine back almost six years to September 30, 1956, we see that CN was offering not one but two passenger trains between Melville and Regina, and these were actual passenger trains, not a freight train with an ancient coach bringing up the rear.
Rolling the clock back even farther, in the wartime year of 1943, we see passenger trains providing service six days a week.
The equipment for trains 61 and 62 is shown in the following table. Basically you had coach service on all trains, and two days a week you’d have a Buffet-Parlor car between Regina and Flin Flon, and a sleeping car between Melville and Flin Flon, MB.
Since we’re heading back through history, let’s go back to 1920, when it was officially still the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, although it was under the operation of the federal government and managed with the Canadian Government Railways as the “Canadian National Railway”.
In late 1920 we see daily (except Sunday) passenger trains 79 & 80 plying the rails between Regina and Melville. Probably it was just one train, departing Regina’s “West Yard” at 07:10, arriving in Melville at 11:15, getting serviced, then departing Melville at 17:15 for the return trip.
Just One More Thing
A special shout-out to Streamliner Memories, a great reference web site where many of the passenger timetable PDFs that I own came from.