From the archives: The lost train of nowhere
Ian MacLeod, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: July 3, 2014, Last Updated: July 3, 2014 6:32 PM EDT
For years it’s been a barroom rumour – that somewhere below LeBreton Flats lies entombed an abandoned rail tunnel, complete with a lost train. IAN MACLEOD tries to pin down one of Ottawa’s most elusive urban legends
Originally published Nov. 23, 2012
The guy on the bar stool next to mine works in the sewer business.
“So what’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen down there?” I ask.
He takes a sip of his beer. “One time a few years ago we found a train.”
“A train? A train! Like a locomotive train?”
“Yeah.”
“In a sewer in Ottawa, you found a train!?”
“Uh-huh. We were on a job down around LeBreton Flats.”
Daily journalism and the sewer business share an important occupational rule: Do not swallow excrement.
“Another guy found it,” he continues. “When he came back up he was yelling, ‘There’s a friggin’ train down there! There’s a friggin’ train down there!’”
What did it look like? What happened to it?
“Don’t know,” he replies with an indifferent shrug, like I’m asking if it’ll rain tomorrow.
On the back of his business card, he draws a map marking the approximate spot and offers the name of the other worker who made the find.
That was 10 months ago.
I’ve searched for the phantom iron horse ever since.
The other worker initially was reluctant to talk much, said his job would be on the line. So I prowled LeBreton Flats’s fallow fields, peered down manholes, dug through archives and musty city directories, talked to puzzled city officials and curious railroad buffs.
Along the way, I bumped into the ghosts of the great tycoon E.P. Taylor, NHL legend Frank Finnigan, inventor and industrialist Thomas “Carbide” Wilson, and a 1947 Ottawa homicide case.
And, yes, there is evidence of an abandoned rail tunnel under the southwestern edge of the Flats at place called Spaghetti Junction.
See, until the mid-1960s, the area immediately west of Le-Breton was the city’s main train-yard, called Ottawa West: 60 acres of track, locomotives, rolling stock, stock pens, coal chutes, lumber yards, freight terminals and the big, sooty CPR roundhouse at Bayview Avenue, the yard’s western boundary.
To the east, smoke and steam hung over the rundown housing, grimy industries and Duke Street taprooms populating the proud and predominantly French-Canadian Flats. The federal government began expropriating and razing the working-class slum and trainyard in 1962, leaving the exposed corpse to rot.
The last freight train pulled out in 1967.
Or did it? The real story begins a century earlier, in 1865, when Englishman Henry Brading, 33, settled in Ottawa and opened the parched lumber town’s first brewery. The Union Brewery stood on the lower reach of the escarpment at 451 Wellington St., almost under the morning shadow of Christ Church Cathedral.
Brading bought out his partners in 1880 and renamed the operation Brading Breweries Ltd. He died in 1903 and controlling interest went to Ottawa entrepreneur Charles Magee and his family.
In 1930, Magee’s sharp and ambitious 29-year-old Ottawa grandson, Edward Plunkett Taylor, took control of Brading’s and turned it into the cornerstone of a business empire that made Taylor one of the most illustrious Canadian businessmen of the 20th Century.
When the Depression hit, Taylor went on an aggressive buying spree, snapping up dozens of small Ontario breweries which he consolidated and modernized or closed. The conglomerate became Canadian Breweries Ltd., later known as Carling O’Keefe.
As Brading’s prospered, hockey sensation Finnigan, one of the original Ottawa Senators, was hired as head of sales after retiring from the Maple Leafs in 1937. Alcoholism derailed the “Shawville Express” and his job with the brewery just three years later.
Meanwhile, back in 1899, Henry Kuntz of the Waterloo, Ont. Kuntz brewing dynasty opened the Capital Brewing Co. Ltd. at 386-389 Wellington St., at the southwest corner of Bay Street, across from where Library and Archives Canada now stands.
The federal government expropriated the land in 1912, but leased it back to the brewery. In 1927, Capital Brewing and Mackenzie King’s government went to court in a dispute over rent and taxes. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada and Capital lost.
The financial blow allowed Taylor to move in and purchase Capital and all the Kuntz holdings in 1929. A year later, Capital moved to 840 Wellington St. (now the south side of Albert Street), at Preston Street, facing the trainyard.
Then, in 1938, Brading’s uptown land at 451 Wellington St. was expropriated too, this time for the planned beautification of Ottawa. Brading’s continued brewing at the site until 1944, when Taylor relocated the label to 840 Wellington St. and merged it with Capital to become Brading’s Capital Brewery Ltd. (The original brewery at 451 Wellington St. continued to lease the land and operate under Taylor’s O’Keefe label until 1956. The building was demolished in 1960.)
The new company embarked on a multi-million dollar plant expansion in late 1945, announcing the $200,000 purchase of the massive International Marine Signal Building directly across Wellington, once touted by some as the longest building in the British Empire.
Stretching more than 300 metres from the former Broad Street almost to Champagne Avenue (now City Centre Drive), the structure was built in 1902 by “Carbide” Wilson to manufacture acetylene-fired marine buoys and lighthouse beacons for the world’s shipping lanes.
A decade earlier, Wilson developed the first commercial process for the production of calcium carbide, a chemical compound in the manufacture of acetylene gas. His discovery led to the creation of the Union Carbide Corporation, now part of The Dow Chemical Co.
As part of the plant expansion, Brading’s said a tunnel would be dug under Wellington for the movement of millions of bottles of beer from the plant on the south side to the warehouse on the north side. There was no mention of how that would be accomplished, whether by trolley, conveyor or possibly by a factory train on narrow-gauge tracks.
About two years later, on the night of Aug. 13, 1947, Horace Bisson, 44, of Stirling Avenue in Hintonburg, was riding his bicycle east along Wellington, between Preston and Champagne, when he was hit and killed by an oncoming taxi.
Cabbie Ross Manning, 21, went on trial for manslaughter. He testified he had just driven through safety barriers at the tunnel construction site when Bisson’s bike veered into his path. The jury acquitted him.
The tunnel, which never again attracted attention, is believed to have operated for many years, with men moving countless cases of Brading’s and Capital lager, ale and port from the plant to the sprawling warehouse, where they were shipped out on trucks.
Ron Snow, now 84, worked in the plant’s accounting department from 1951 to 1953. As an office worker, he doesn’t recall the tunnel. But he does remember one of his daily duties was to escort a provincial liquor inspector over to the ware-house, where Canadian Breweries Ltd. stored an ocean of suds, much destined for Montreal.
Snow laughs as he recounts how the inspector was far more interested in consuming beer than counting it. “By the end of the day, this fellow didn’t know whether he was counting beers or sheep.”
By 1954, Brading’s had opened additional plants in Montreal, Hamilton and Windsor. Two years later, Canadian Breweries Ltd. moved the Ottawa operation to Toronto and hoisted the O’Keefe banner atop the plant.
In the peak years that followed, the brewery reportedly shipped as many as 168,000,000 bottles of beer a year across eastern and central Ontario and Quebec. The last of billions of pints came off the line in 1969, when the business was consolidated in Toronto. The building was demolished in the 1970s and replaced with the Tompkins Housing Co-Operative and the Walnut Court townhouse development.
The warehouse property was expropriated by the National Capital Commission in 1962 – the brewery continued using the building – and demolished in 1983 over the protests of heritage advocates. Fragments of the foundation and sections of concrete floor remain.
A few years ago, when the city was installing a high-pressure transmission water main along the north side of Albert, Bruce Ballantyne and other Bytown Railway Society members went to watch for any traces of the former trainyard to surface.
As the excavation project neared of the old brewers’ warehouse site along Albert, “we looked down in the trench they had created and saw the tunnel opening, which was being walled up with concrete,” Bal-lantyne told me.
“No doubt this was the tunnel from the brewery to the warehouse and they were just plugging the entrance rather than filling in the tunnel under the street. There was no sign of any track but that may have been removed before the buildings were torn down.”
Meanwhile, officials with the City of Ottawa’s communications office told me there was nothing in municipal records about any tunnel, much less a lost train.
Then I came across a tattered 1949 underground engineering diagram for that stretch of Albert, which is nicknamed “Spaghetti Junction” for the tangle of old water and sewer pipes snaking beneath.
The “Brading’s Brewery Tunnel” is clearly marked, a straight line traversing about 20 metres across then-Wellington, from the brewery on the south side to the warehouse on the north.
A cross-section diagram shows the passage is about 7.5 metres deep and winds under two water mains and over one sewer line, giving a contorted, elbow shape and a dubious grade for a short-track rail line.
My search was running out steam. Finally, one man, a municipal worker, sat down and told me his tale about a second brewery tunnel.
One day around 1988, water pres-sure dropped in the area and the man and other workers later found a broken water main near a fire hydrant on the north side of Albert, about 80 metres east of the former brewery and about 120 metres east of the Brading’s tunnel.
Instead of gushing water, though, there was a small, mysterious sinkhole. The worker returned alone later that day and rappelled about 10 metres down into the strange cavity.
When his feet touched the ground, he said he found himself an old rail tunnel. The passage was about two metres high, with what appeared to be rough limestone walls. Dusty old bottles and cases of beer littered the floor.
With a flashlight, he saw the tunnel stretched east and west into the darkness and was big enough that it had consumed the torrent of water from the broken main for 16 hours with no sign of accumulation.
Then, he spotted the train. It was about four metres to the west and small, similar to a mine train: an electric-powered engine hitched to a few stack cars, all on narrow-gauge track.
“It was like a city tram (with) little cars, about 14 feet long,” he said, on condition of anonymity because some work rules were not followed.
“I didn’t really get a chance to go exploring,” he added with regret, explaining how he made a quick exit after just a couple of minutes when other workers unexpectedly arrived at street level.
Based on his account, the tunnel is thought to travel west from the former Broad Street and approximately underneath the east-west bike path running just north of Albert Street. That would have put it directly under the brewers’ warehouse in the Brading days. Presumably, it meets the original passage leading into the brewery.
The water main was repaired and the sinkhole filled with enough concrete and rocks to seal the immediate void, but not the rest of the underground passage.
Brading’s iron pony, it seems, still sits on its rusting track, entombed in a time-tunnel into Ottawa’s past.
Colin Churcher, an Ottawa railway historian and retired Transport Canada director-general who authored The Railway Safety Act, believes someone should recover the mysterious relic.
“If it is there, it should get rescued and put in a museum or put on display somewhere because it is priceless,” he said. “It’s not generally recognized how prominent railways were in industrial development in the past. “This something that really should be brought to the attention of someone who can do something about it.”
BREWERY TRAIN DISCOVERED IN TUNNEL
Around 1988, a city worker investigating a water main break found a small train abandoned in an old tunnel under Lebreton Flats.
The electric-powered engine and cars hauled beer from the nearby Brading’s brewery (later O’Keefe) on Wellington Street to a huge warehouse across the street. The little rail relic is believed to be still there.
LEBRETON FLATS CIRCA 1988
imacleod@ottawacitizen.com
For more information on Canada’s brewing industry, please see the following books:
Brewed in Canada: The Untold Story of Canada’s 350-year-old Brewing Industry, by Allen Winn Sneath (The Dundurn Group, 2001); An Acre of Time, by Phil Jenkins, (Chelsea Books, 2008); E.P. Taylor, by Richard Rohmer (McClelland and Stewart Ltd., 1978).
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-...ain-of-nowhere
Linear Mode
