The Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore: An Illustrated History of Railway Stations in Canada. 3rd ed.

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

There once was a time when few Canadians had far to go to catch a train. There once were nine railroad stations in Montreal and eight in downtown Toronto. In Prince Edward Island there was a station every 3.5 kilometres. On the prairies they were often only 12 kilometres apart and “there are more than two hundred communities in eastern Canada with ‘station’ in their name.” As Ron Brown shows in this exhaustive account of the importance of railroad stations in our history, the station was much more than a place to ship freight or board a coach. It was a focus of the community. Most stations were beautifully designed and built, and their well-maintained gardens were often the only park in town. If it comes as a surprise to the modern reader that “many Canadians were born in, lived in, and died in railway stations,” it is also surprising to read in a chapter titled “The Station as a Place to Play” that “the most popular form of recreation associated with Canada’s stations was prostitution.”

Brown, author of The Last Stop (2002), about Ontario’s heritage train stations has expanded his scope from a province to the nation. There are more than 240 illustrations (many taken by the author) but they do not overwhelm the text, which explores every imaginable facet of our once-great network of railway stations, from “The Railway Towns” to “The Station and the Arts.”

The author is frequently critical of the Mulroney government, which broke a campaign promise and “stripped the country of much of its badly needed rail service,” and of the CNR and CPR for their hostile indifference to their heritage. Sadly, the word “demolished” appears regularly in the book, even before the penultimate chapter which deals with the destruction of stations by the hundreds in the 1960s and 1970s. There is a glimmer of optimism in Brown’s report of recent federal legislation to protect them, but the vast majority of our railway stations have been lost forever. This attractive and important book is a wonderful tribute to all of them