I have appreciated the opportunity to contribute to a blog that recalls a time when I lived on another island with a deep-sea port that serves a different ocean. The thread with my comments is here Overview of Turcot Yards in Montreal. When I was young, the Turcot yards were about trains. As British Columbia builds grand infrastructure for the Olympics, it is interesting to see what becomes of of these proud (and expensive) monuments in only one generation. There is a fine quality to that blog. I think you will enjoy it.
Technorati Tags: Canada, Montreal, Montreal West, nature, Network, Olympics, pictures, Turcot, walk
The Turcot roundhouse used to be directly below the CPR Glen/Westmount yards and was accessed by a path down the escarpment just East of where old Decarie is.
To access Turcot by road, you turned South on St Remi, then West on Pullman I think it was, to get to the rear of the roundhouse.
Fascinating place to be when steam locomotives were still in use.
We used to sit at the South end of Decarie and watch them service the engines.
As the engine arrived from a run, it dropped it’s fire into a water-filled pit between the rails where the fire was quenched, in a cloud of steam. A large overhead travelling crane with a clamshell bucket then moved the wet ashes to waiting gondolas for use as fill along the line.
The engine without a fire then moved East on it’s own steam into a wooden-walled Blow Down Pen where most of the hot water from the boiler was drained out.
This made a thunderous ROAR and a huge cloud of steam.
Minerals and treatment from the water collected so the rails were buried right up to their heads, looking like streetcar track.
The engine was then moved onto the turntable and into the roundhouse for maintenance, the rest of the water being drained inside.
There were other outbound engines getting coal and water.
The coal chute was to the West of the roundhouse was, in all, about 1/4 mile long, with a long-sloped trestle up which coal hoppers were shoved by a Yard Engine into the covered tower from the West end.
The coal was dumped into bins beneath the track in the tower, and engines on paralled tracks below took coal into their tenders from chutes on the bottom of each side of the tower.
In 1961 we spent the summer watching them scrap over 110 steam locomotives at Turcot. Sad, and never able to be forgotten.
We used to take the 106 bus along U L road and go down the STEEP road at the East side of Rose Bowl lanes to get into the Yards. A real thrill on a bike!
In winter the City of Montreal used to go down the same road with trucks of snow to dump once the tracks were lifted in 1960s.
Their Yard was almost right across the street.
LaSalle Coke used to quench coke, and each time a huge cloud of steam would rise for almost a mile in the air, especially in winter.
Until 1956 or so, all the gas used in the city was provided by LaSalle Coke and stored in the rising tanks once so prominent.
The Natrual Gas arrived by pipeline from the West, spelling the doom, ultimately, of LaSalle Coke.
I suspect byproducts from LaSalle Coke were used at Monsanto.
The crane still extantby the canal was emptied by small narrow-gauge coal cars on a cable which cirulated into the plant proper South of St. Patrick St. at CPR Power Jct.
When a canaller was being unloaded they wrapped the wheelhouse and aft quarters on the boat with canvas as coal would blow from the clamshell bucket and also rain down on your car if you stopped to watch the unloading.
If you had binoculars, you could watch the coal cars circulating from the foot of Decarie.
CNR changed from steam to electric or vice vera on passenger trains at Turcot East on Central Station Trains.
Montreal Tramways used to run along the South side of Turcot Yard thru to Lachine.
I too remember the explosion at Monsanto, and there was an apartment block in La Salle the exploded from Natrual Gas, killing 20 or so a few years earlier. We could see the smoke out our kitchen window.
Around 1962 a private house blew up on Beaconsfield Ave. just North of Sherbrooke.
We were coming in from Dorval and saw the houses on fire at Brock, and immediately rode our bikes down.
There used to be a single-track level crossing of the CNR which went by Consumers Glass in VSP, then around West of CPR Sortin Yard and thru to Vertu and thence to Jacques Cartier Jct. just South of Bordeaux Jail.
Old CNR at that time still passed thru Lachine to Dorval along side the Tramways out to Dixie.
Cdnlococo, thank-you for the thoughtful comments. I sense that you and I saw west-end Montreal from a similar perspective… but your views seem more mature. I suspect you are 4 or 5 years older than me. We may have passed each other on our bikes or at the counter at Elmhurst Dairy.
Dear Robert,
Yes, I sense that I am just a bit older than you. I once went to Iona School over by Decarie, then to Rosedale School when part of the classes were still being held in the old Church Hall South of Terrebonne at Mariette.
The Old Hall was being demolished when JFK was shot.
If you go look at the house on the NW corner of Marriette and Terrebonne there used to be a white-on-blue enamel road sign on it’s bricks, which were rare even in the sixties.
I then went to Monklands High over on Benny/West Hill.
We had many a cone at the old Elmhurst Dairy, and, the joke always was the Bull and the Cow’s afterquarters were intact behind the billboard to the West of the dairy proper.
I once spent 1/2 an hour looking for AVON on a Service Order! Was I mad!
We haunted the train yards as kids, if not Turcot and it’s swamps, old Sortin Yard over at the end of Cote St Luc Rd.
Lots of steam engines still, and the Lachine Canal not yet replaced by the Seaway.
There were billboards overlooking 2/17 just down the hill from SKF and International Trucks and we could sit on them and view the whole scene of Turcot West, Canadian Car and Foundry and the Canal, once again with Lachine streetcars going back and forth.
Therw was a Trucker’s Hotle, Peg’s?? on the corner of U L Rd where the truck tractors had all sorts of licence plates from everywhere.
I don’t have time today, but once we walked the St. Pierre River from over by the CPR Hump near Blue Bonnets Raceway thru to CPR Sortin Yards at the Wentworth Golf Course.
It drained all the arable land once where Cote St Luc is now, along Kildare, etc.
Yes, we probably DID pass somewhere, maybe watching trains at Mtl West when seeing a DIESEL on a train was a novelty, and the Tramways used to turn up on Sherbrbrooke when thr Streetcars used to still turn at Elmhurst Loop.
They had a big revolving illuminated LaSalle Taxi sign there next to old Track 4 at the station.
Hmmm . . .
I can’t help but wonder who you fellows are. My friends and I haunted Montreal West in the years 1954 to 1958 or so. Watching trains. And, indeed, I recall wanting to see DIESELS!!! After all, steamers were commonplace, eh? In fact I have a couple of snaps of The Canadian at Montreal West and a steamer too. They can be seen by clicking the small thumbnails at the bottom of this web page http://danks.netfirms.com/locos.htm
And yes, when we could afford it out of our allowances, the cones at Elmhurst (although I had forgotten the name of the place) were a real treat.
Yup, on bicycles too.
I wonder if we knew each other all those years ago.
Terry, I’ve just been reviewing your web site. The photography is stunning! I see that you have also done some excellent astrophotography. My interest in astronomy began a few years after you left the Montreal West area… in 1963. In June of ‘63 a member of the Royal Astronomical Society, Karl McNamara, visited a neighbour, and he brought his telescope. Long after everyone else had gone to bed he was showing me wonders of the night sky. He told me that he was organizing a train to go to to Grand-Mère in July to see an eclipse of the sun. The next day I announced that our family was going. We did. That train was the first in many years to stop in Grand-Mère, and the town had a band to greet us at the station. The eclipse was awesome. Karl was a member of the Montreal Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. I joined that group. It was a turning point in my life. I’ve worked in three of Canada’s largest planetariums over a period of 20 years. I’m still a member of the Montreal Centre.
Hi Terry, I was born in 1943, so I would have been riding my bike around Montreal West during the years that you were there. I was one of the Ballantyne family who lived on Ballantyne Avenue South. My cousin Ralph was like an older brother, and he lived on the Upper Lachine Road (Avon Road). I clearly remember us watching a diesel passing through the crossing at Westminster, and him saying to my amazement, “Someday all of the engines will be diesel.” Thanks for the link to the pictures.
Well, I am a little surprised (disappointed?) that perhaps we did not actually know one another. I was born in ‘44 so we are contemporaries. I lived on Coronation Avenue (1954-56) and then King Edward (1956-58) before moving to Pointe Claire. Rode the commuter trains to high school and college (Loyola) until finishing in 1965.
Elementary school was St. Ignatius (corner West Broadway and Terrebonne). My best friend Barry, a year or two older than I, went to Monklands which I also saw mentioned here.
My Dad drove me to Grande Mere for the eclipse in 1963 and I hauled my 4″ refractor along. I still remember the deep red of the prominences visible. Was thrilled at them! But it was such a short eclipse! I envy what the folks in Asia saw today.
I only stumbled on this site as a result of searching for photos of the Montreal West CPR station. Didn’t find any unfortunately.
What remains of it now?
Thanks for dropping by the web site, BTW.
Was perusing the web looking for photos of NDG, and, was quite successful, finding a photo of Meldrum the Mover at Walkley and Sherbrooke when it was STILL a telephone exchange!
Found a companion photo of the ‘new’ BTCo exchange on Monkland, later HUnter, taken between 1952, when the West extension was added to the building, but, prior to 1956, when the 3A streetcar from Girouard to Walkley by Steinberg’s was removed.
Worked at HUnter for a while, amongst the Line Finders, Selectors and Connectors.
( Steinberg’s once had a tunnel with conveyors for groceries South beneath Somerled to their once-large parking lot on the East side of Walkley. )
We used to LIVE at Montreal West Station, and the 3 E8s 1800-02 were Diesel favorites, they occasionally operated two coupled.
Listening to the steam locomotive exhausts echoing off Slumhaven village apartments as they left for Westmount was lovely.
My father and I saw the eclipse in 1963, but, we went up by train. CP ran an ‘Eclipse Special’ the locomotives being CP 1800-8705, then an almost-rare GP9 in the East, a MLW stronghold.
We used to visit the stored to be scrapped steam locomotives at the CP St Luc roundhouse, then spent many a day watching the CNR cut them up at Turcot in ‘61.
At one time, Hydro Quebec had a small substation on the North side of Somerled between Doherty and O’Bryan.
Used to listen to the steam engines, then the Diesels pull up the grade from LaSalle/Highland, South and North Jcts and then whistle for the crossing, back in the Fifties, at Cote St Luc road at West Broadway, before the shopping centre was built in ‘56.
At night, on hot summer evenings you could hear the small air whistle at the CPR Hump over near Blue Bonnets, the air whistle indicating to the pin puller how many cars to cut off to let down to the retarders, then the clatter of the retarders applying to slow them down.
The whistles and horns of various yard engines around the area, and along St Patrick St. puctuated the nights.
A canaller in the Lachine Canal would whistle 3-long for the bascule bridge at St Pierre by the Tramways substation and Canadian Car and Foundry and for the CPR swing bridge upstream by Dominion Bridge.
LaSalle Coke would quench their name product resulting in an atomic-like cloud of steam hovering and expanding ominously.
Minto was the street that disappeared.
DExter was our phone No, then HUnter 4.
HUnter 2 was electronic and Touch Tone could be ordered.
All gone now.
Many changes.
The 105 is not what it used to be.
Thank You!
Don’t forget the Fifties Royal Bank branch on the NE corner of Grand and Monkland, now an apartment.
The Tramways used to Wye rush hour streetcars at Grand and Monkland, the original end of track before they extended to Walkley and Somerled.
The wye was there until the end of streetcars on that route in 1956, making a satisfyling clanking beneath the floor as cars turned left onto Monkland towards Girouard.
Yes, things have definitely changed in good old NDG.
Hi Cdnlococo, thanks for conjuring up those images and sounds of the Montreal that I remember… and left so long ago.
I have a very vague memory of an orchard where Westhaven Village appeared. I don’t recall the term Slumhaven being used.
So now I am curious to know who is behind the name, Cdnlococo. Isn’t it time for you to found your own blog or web site?