The old Canadian National station in Palmerston is high on the list of significant landmarks from the railway age in Wellington County.
It is an unusual building for a railway station, heavily modified and renovated over its lifetime. In its prime it was the major transportation hub in the northern half of Wellington, serving passenger trains on six lines, along with mountains of mail and express.
Much of the history of the building is murky. In the early 20th century the Grand Trunk constructed expensive edifices on its main lines. Branches received much less attention. Stations on those lines were sometimes makeshift. Many were modified or enlarged as required by traffic levels. None received as much work as the one at Palmerston.
Originally, Palmerston was an insignificant station on the Great Western Railway’s line from Guelph through Elora and Fergus to Southampton. The town owes its existence to the railway, which opened late in 1871. Palmerston became a junction with the construction of a branch from there to Kincardine a few years later.
The importance of the town grew dramatically in the 1880s with the opening of more lines. Initially operated by independent companies, those lines, as well as the Great Western, eventually came under the ownership of the Grand Trunk Railway.
Palmerston became a major hub, with offices for supervisors and bookkeepers.
The Palmerston station reflected those changes with a series of renovations and additions, including efforts to make the building, originally a plain wooden structure, into a more attractive one.
Built entirely of wood, the building became something of a firetrap as a result of the modifications, with cavities in walls and corners, and a number of stoves for heating. The inevitable fire broke out on the evening of Oct. 26, 1909.
About 9:30pm someone noticed smoke in the upstairs of the building, in offices over the waiting room. By then the last passenger trains of the day had departed, and only a few employees were in the building.
Palmerston’s fire department arrived quickly in response to the alarm. The men hooked up to the brand new Palmerston water system, and in a few minutes they had six hoses playing on the fire. Grand Trunk employees who were still at the building rushed to save the books and papers in the offices and took them to a small storage building near the station.
The town’s fire alarm and the commotion around the station soon drew a large portion of the town’s population, including railway workers, who assisted with the evacuation of papers and telegraph equipment from the station. Other men moved out the express and boxes of freight that were in the building. Much of the latter was already in the express office, a separate building attached to the station by a covered platform. Firefighters saved that structure from the flames.
Due to the volume of water sprayed on the building, most of the damage was confined to the interior of the building. Onlookers were certain that the building was doomed. The efforts of the firefighters saved the exterior walls, though the roof had collapsed into the interior of the building.
Several Grand Trunk officials arrived the next morning on the train from Stratford. Local officials, though, already had the situation under control. They had arranged with the Queen’s Hotel, which sat directly across the tracks from the station, to provide temporary accommodation for dealing with the public.
There were a couple of spare coaches in the yard. A locomotive shifted them to a track beside the station for the use of officials. Both had stoves for heating, making them comfortable, if a little awkward, for temporary offices.
A quick estimate by Grand Trunk officials put the damage at $10,000. There were no injuries, though the firemen were drenched to the skin and a couple contracted colds as a result.
That was the second fire in the Palmerston station. A few years earlier a stove pipe had ignited some paper, but the damage then was not extensive. On that occasion the station resumed service after a clean-up.
This time, though, the damage was far greater. The charred roof sat inside the structure on top of the collapsed second floor and the furniture, all thoroughly drenched. The division superintendent decided to investigate personally.
He arrived in Palmerston on Nov. 27, the day after the fire, accompanied by several other officials. They examined the ruins, still smoking, very carefully. The engineers were impressed that the exterior walls had suffered little damage and were quite sound. Before returning to Stratford the superintendent announced his decision to rebuild the station rather than replace it. A new interior could be built easily within the old walls, he concluded.
The Grand Trunk was, in that era, building or planning new stations at a number of locations. That list includes Brampton, Guelph, Kitchener, and Stratford, among others. Alas, Palmerston was not to be one of them.
The Grand Trunk lost no time in proceeding with the work. The temporary quarters for the station staff were awkward at best, and it was therefore desirable to restore the station as quickly as possible. A work train, with a crew of workers in boarding cars and several carloads of construction supplies and tools, arrive in Palmerston on Nov. 1.
The first task was clearing out the debris in the interior, down to portions of the floor. Like most railway buildings, the station had no proper foundation or solid floor. It rested on a series of pads, which would shift and sink during spring thaws.
The reconstruction work did not include a proper foundation or concrete floor. That meant that a work crew would need to return to the building every few years to jack up and shim the floor.
The reconstruction work provided a new configuration of the upstairs office space, which had been something of a maze as a result of various renovation schemes. The new design provided a two-storey interior space for the main waiting room, with a fancy wood ceiling. With its windows that formerly lit the upstairs rooms, the space was unique and quite attractive, though a little eccentric.
The restored station included two towers, neither of which had a practical purpose. The building was back in service by the middle of December 1909, but finishing touches were not completed until the spring of 1910. The restored building was painted in the last Grand Trunk paint scheme, grey with green highlights and trim.
After that work, the station was at its peak in attractiveness. In later years, after the Canadian National takeover of the Grand Trunk, the building slowly degenerated. During the Depression era a false ceiling went up in the waiting room to save the expense of heating the large room.
In the early 1950s the awnings around the building came off and a layer of red insulbrick covered the original board-and-batten siding. The towers, always a maintenance headache, were removed. One of them became a tool shed, located near the station. By the time passenger service ended in 1970 the building had become an ill-maintained ruin. The old express building, which had escaped the 1909 fire, was torn down.
Palmerston’s station closed completely in 1982.
The municipality was able to secure title to the building and the old yards. Volunteers began restoration efforts to the station, attempting to returning it to its appearance following the 1909 fire. Once again it has grey board-and-batten siding, and the wood ceiling in the waiting room is again visible. It is now known as the Palmerston Railway Heritage Museum, and the yards have been named the Lions Club Heritage Park.
The other major structure in the old Palmerston yards, the footbridge, is 100 years old in 2012. That event will be marked with a three-day railway festival on the second weekend of August.