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Approximate location of the former station, Connaught Hill (Google Street View)

When riding down the Expo Line from Edmonds to 22nd Street, one may notice that it is a rather lengthy ride. At nearly 2 KM, it’s nowhere near the longest distance between stations, but when it was the interurban Central Park Line, there was a station in-between the two.

The BC Electric Railway (BCER) had a station around what is now 9th Avenue in Burnaby or simply situated south of a SkyTrain maintenance facility. Connaught Hill, named after after the western province of Ireland named Connaught, was a small station serving the now-residential area straddling the Burnaby and New Westminster border.

Station location in New Westminster (Google)

Back then, it was a large gravel pit. The hole created conveniently ended up becoming the SkyTrain maintenance facility we have today.

Connaught Hill as it appeared in the 1950s (TransLink / BC Transit)

Today, there sits no station but you can visit its old location when travelling along the BC Parkway.

Stopped to take a photo as I cycled on by. You can see the remnants of the old tracks left behind.

I just came back from Boston and ended up riding each line that the MBTA provides in the Boston area except for commuter rail and some heritage railway I didn’t need to use. Because of how weird the entire network is itself, I have a thought on each line in a sort of roasting-like manner.

The whole network is weird to me because no single line runs the same type of vehicle as another. This is a bit baffling coming from a city where there are three lines and two of them use the same train types. That and the headways between trains just makes it so awkward.

At least this visit to Boston unlike the last one had all of the lines as functioning although on the weekend one line was running with a shuttle bus between two stations.

Red Line

Braintree and Alewife are termini? These names are just wild. This is probably the most normal of the lines I rode

Blue Line

Wonderland is the name of a terminus? I have never been in a subway where not only do the platforms curve upward but also to a side. That is some impressive engineering.

Orange Line

Nice to know that trains can catch fire and not manage to kill anyone. Why does this line run so slowly again?

Green Line

Good lord. This line is weird. Level-crossings for pedestrians isn’t so weird, but it is extremely weird when they’re inside of the subway itself. Also, is this a subway or a tram? The use of low-floor trains kind of remind of Brussels’ tram network, but these cars are nowhere near as elegant.

The theme of Expo 86 was transportation and many, many countries took advantage of the show to demonstrate their developments in this field. Of course, the star of the show was Canada’s SkyTrain, but Japan showed its maglev train, America its cars, and the United Kingdom showed its conventional rail.

British Rail, the then government corporation behind operation and development of rail transportation in the United Kingdom decided to send one of its Class 142 train sets (aka “Pacer”) diesel trains (dubbed as “railbus”) to tour Metro Vancouver.

They regularly ran service from a temporary station in Abbotsford to New Westminster during the summer months of 1986 along the railway once referred to as the Fraser Valley Line during the BC Electric Railway days.

It did make an appearance near the Expo grounds at Pacific Central and was given a largely lukewarm reception by locals and government officials. The common critique of the train was the one shared by those back in the UK: it was an uncomfortable ride.

The reasons behind the uncomfortable ride are known: unlike most trains, this was based on a bus made by British Leyland. A rail chassis was fixed to the bus body and then some slight modifications were made to the cab to make it “rail-ready”. Unlike a typical train, the wheels were fixed in place which made them noisy. To add to this, there were only two axels per car unlike the typical four you’d see on other trains including all of the ones used by SkyTrain today, which resulted in a rougher ride.

After the summer, the train set was sent back to the UK where it operated on various different services until all Pacers were retired at the end of 2020.

This is a reproduction of a post made on cohost.org where my friend, Tam and I went on to travel on the entirety of Metro Vancouver’s SkyTrain network

Today, my friend, witchpixels and I are going to travel the entire length of the three-line, 79.6 KM rapid transit system known as SkyTrain! This will have us riding eight trains through 53 stations across seven municipalities in Metro Vancouver!

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while and with the construction of the Broadway extension and the upcoming Surrey/Langley extension, this is our opportunity to ride the system using what we believe is the shortest path!

12:27 PM - VCC Clark

It begins! 12:27 pm we have left VCC Clark!

12:48 PM - Lougheed Town Centre

12:48 PM and we are at Lougheed Town Centre!

1:04 PM - Lafarge Lake-Douglas

1:04 PM and we completed the Millennium line! Now to go back! We lucked out as our train didn’t require us to deboard!

1:23 PM - Lougheed Town Centre

1:23 PM and we made it to Lougheed! Unfortunately we will be waiting for our transfer train to get us to Columbia.

1:37 PM - Columbia

1:37 PM and we managed to make a quick transfer at Columbia! Onward into Surrey!

1:45 PM - King George

1:45 PM and we made it on to the long leg all the way to Waterfront!

2:21 PM - Passing VCC-Clark

2:21 PM and we are just passing where we started!

2:31 PM - Waterfront

2:31 PM and we made it to Waterfront! We are going to Richmond-Brighouse first! We had to pass through the station hall but somehow boarded our waiting train effortlessly!

So far we have lucked out on transfers with the worst being five minutes!

2:58 PM - Richmond-Brighouse

2:58 PM and we are at Richmond-Brighouse! One more transfer left and we will be at the end!

3:07 PM - Bridgeport

3:07 PM and we are about to do the last leg. The train we need is immediately next!

3:20 PM - YVR Airport

And time! 2 hours 49 minutes and 8 seconds to ride the entire SkyTrain system! I guess in 2025 or 2026 we can do this again with the Millennium Line extension to Arbutus.

Post-journey statistics

If anyone wants to know the splits, they’re as follows:

• VCC Clark to Lafarge Lake/Douglas - 36m 36s
• Lafarge Lake/Douglas to Lougheed Town Centre - 17m 28s *
• Lougheed Town Centre to Columbia - 13m 50s
• Columbia to King George - 10m 20s
• King George to Waterfront - 43m 45s
• Waterfront to Richmond-Brighouse - 29m 58s
• Richmond-Brighouse to Bridgeport - 7m 55s *
• Bridgeport to YVR-Airport - 9m 8s

*Denotes that we never had to transfer trains to continue our journey!

Update (August 30, 2023)

Holy shit. We beat the Guinness record for this speedrun.

The SkyTrain speedrun was beaten on this trip!

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Map showing the Port Kells area of Surrey (Google)

In a few years, you’ll be able to ride SkyTrain all the way into Langley, passing by one of Cloverdale’s quiet landmarks: the Honeybee Centre. However, if you go just the building, you’ll notice a road that runs on an angle, which is odd considering most of Surrey’s roads tend to run in cardinal directions save for Fraser Highway and a few others.

Harvie Rd. is a shortcut from Port Kells to the rest of Surrey, but its origins as a road do not come from being a shortcut but instead a railway. There are a few roads that do not conform to the grid system and they too share this history as well.

Approximate path that the railway took

In 1891, the New Westminster-Southern Railway opened a passenger railway crossing across the US border into Cloverdale and then to New Westminster via Port Kells. This route followed what is now Highway 15 with a deviation around a hill in Hazlemere.

For some time, it was the only rail service connecting the United States and Canada west of the Rockies. Its construction was of major concern to the federal government due to possible threat to sovereignty by the Americans.

Southern portion of the railway about 3 KM north of the United States border

In 1907, the Great Northern Railway, the parent company to the NWSR, opted to reroute all rail service to its line which straddled the Semiahmoo peninsula and subsequently ended its inland rail connection going through Blaine. The NWSR struggled to remain competitive in the face of the BC Electric Railway providing similar service, which intersected in Cloverdale.

By 1929, the railway was declared abandoned and as time has gone on much of the right of way has been usurped by the highway it once ran alongside. However, remnants of it are still visible if you know where to look.

Harvey Rd. as seen from near the Port Kells Library

As for road itself, it got its name from NWSR’s first engineer, Robert Harvie. It has since received heritage right of way status from the City of Surrey, which protects it as a roadway.

If you’re interested in additional information, this blog article from 2014 is also worth a read! I used the custom Google Maps link they created to generate the above maps.

This is also a post archived from cohost.org/VancouverTransit.