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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.

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Commercial Drive and Broadway circa 1940s with a street car 5 going downtown and an interurban going to New Westminster (City of Vancouver Archives)

The intersection of Commercial Drive and Broadway is today a major interchange station between SkyTrain’s Millennium and Expo lines, and the rapid bus 99 B-Line. Historically, this area has been of major importance the two BC Electric Railway’s interurban lines which served east Vancouver (the Central Park and Burnaby Lake lines) merged with the street car serving Commercial Drive to then feed into downtown.

However, this produced a major choke point as having three different rail services interlining on a single street created serious congestion challenges for the BCER. A solution proposed in the 1920s was a proposal to extend the Central Park line from Victoria and Hull all the way to Main Street.

Map showing railways around East Vancouver (City of Vancouver Archives)

Walking along Commercial as it bends to become Victoria

This would have extended the line northwest along the curve where Victoria turns into Commercial, then crossing Clark and Broadway, with a tunnel under St. Catherine’s Street, then following along E. 2nd Avenue until finally turning to cross False Creek, then finally terminating at the Great Northern Station located at Carrall and Keefer.

A very failed attempt at overlaying the old map and the current state, looking at Commercial and Broadway

Same process but looking at the rail yards in and around Pacific Central and Terminal Ave

Overlaying the map from the 1930s on something modern takes a lot of guesswork as you can tell, but this gives you a pretty good idea of what the Expo Line could have been.

Lakeview station which was then a community garden but has since become housing

With the onset of the Second World War and decade-later closure of the Central Park line, these plans were never meant to be. The modern Expo Line now turns away from what was then Cedar Cottage (now a community garden) and crosses over Broadway and Commercial to follow the Grandview cut towards downtown.

That said, with the extension of the Millennium Line to Arbutus, a tunnel is now going to grace the neighbourhood of Mount Pleasant after all.

This was an article originally posted to cohost.org/VancouverTransit but moved here due to the site’s shutdown.

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Gilmore at platform-level

If you were to pull up information about the Millennium Line, you’d soon come across its opening date of January 7th, 2002. With that known, you’d then say that every station opened then as being the oldest.

This assumption is fairly safe as the line itself is a relatively new railway. Unlike the Expo Line, much of the initial alignment did not make use of a another railway’s existing or former right of way. This means that stations such as Sperling-Burnaby Lake or Lougheed Town Centre have no real historical reference.

However, this is not entirely true for all of the stations which opened in 2002.

A view towards a right of way crossing at Gilmore and Henning

The BC Electric Railway used to run a similar line to compliment the Central Park line named the Burnaby Lake line. It ran from New Westminster at the same spot the Central Park line did and merged with the street car line on Commercial Drive just its sibling.

At some point, I should write about the Burnaby Lake line, but the point here is that the Millennium Line does intersect with the remnants of this line.

Gilmore station as viewed from the same spot

Today’s Gilmore Station is located at the intersection of the street bearing its name and Dawson. It’s probably one of the weirder stations in my opinion not because of anything other than its ceilings resembling curved plywood. I guess one can just go across the street to the Home Depot to pick up replacement panels should any of them fail.

However, the station’s previous incarnation was fairly unassuming and significantly more rural.

Map showing GIlmore on the Burnaby Lake line (City of Vancouver Archives)

The original Gilmore Station from the Burnaby Lake line days was too at Gilmore and Dawson. It was to serve the swampy, agricultural area known as Still Creek. I could write extensively about the history of Still Creek, but really that was just it.

As part of the shutdown of the BCER in favour of trolley and diesel buses, it closed in 1956.

Interurban travelling along the Burnaby Lake line (City of Burnaby Archives)

The main difference between the BCER station and the one we have today is where the current station stands. However, the original station site does continue serving a public good.

View of the Gilmore Pump Station approximately where the original Gilmore station stood

On the site of the original BCER station is Gilmore Pump Station, which while does not serve rail traffic anymore, it does serve a function to make sure that if you were to come downstairs from the Millennium Line, you don’t encounter a giant puddle.

This originally appeared on cohost.org/VancouverTransit but has been moved here due to the site’s shutdown.

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Plaza of Nations at Expo 86 (City of Vancouver Archives)

Expo 86 was Vancouver’s “coming out” party and its theme was transportation. This of course coincided with the opening of what is now the Expo Line from Waterfront to its then terminus at New Westminster. However, there were a few rapid transit systems built for the exposition including one very useful monorail system.

Map showing the transfer point between then “Stadium” station to the Expo 86 monorail (City of Vancouver Archives)

During the event, a monorail platform was situated to the west of what was then Stadium station and it provided speedy service across the sprawling World’s Fair. The entire length of the service spanned over five kilometres and it was vital in not only connecting the parts of the False Creek portion of the fair, but also back to SkyTrain itself which was a link to the Canada Pavilion at what is now Canada Place, next to Waterfront station.

Monorail cruising through the Expo 86 grounds (City of Vancouver Archives)

The monorail itself had several other stops including two near what is now Yaletown-Roundhouse station on the Canada Line, inside of the Plaza of Nations near BC Place Stadium, one at the Cambie Street bridge, and one more just a block from Main Street-Science World (which would then have been just “Main Street” as Science World was simply “Expo Centre” during the fair).

Expo 86 and the Monorail (City of Vancouver Archives)

One interesting thing about the monorail was that it was envisioned as a possible rapid transit system for Metro Vancouver as early as the 1950s (at some point I should write about this). However, when finally built, it simply hugged False Creek and after the fair was over, was dismantled and sent off to England where it became a staple of an amusement park starting in summer 1987.

Proposed tram or street car system (City of Vancouver)

The route it took however is still an option under consideration for a street car service (see green-coloured line above), but Vancouver City Council has been speaking about this idea for decades and it probably could be decades more before we ever see that happen even though as early as last year it had another report released on it.

This originally appeared on cohost.org/VancouverTransit but has been moved here due to the site’s shutdown.

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Light rail vehicle parked at a rail yard in New Westminster (City of Vancouver Archives)

When Vancouver dismantled its interurban railway network in the 1950s, it wasn’t long until local officials and the provincial government began to discuss options to recreate it in the form of a rapid transit.

In the 1970s, constant traffic problems and the oil crisis spurred the provincial government to start serious proposals for what would become the region’s rail system.

Proposed rapid transit routes from the 1970s (University of British Columbia Archives)

The above map isn’t too dissimilar to what we have today (Hastings and North Shore do not have rail as of today), but the government’s idea was to quickly revive the old BC Electric Railway by strong-arming it into existence.

And how do you force a railway to exist? By of course buying a Siemens vehicle from what was then West Germany to demonstrate the proposal along the Central Park BCER line (which is now the Expo Line).

However, in 1976, a succeeding government who didn’t like the purchase but had to receive it anyway opted to keep the train in storage. It languished in a rail yard in New Westminster until 1987 when it sold it to a group in Edmonton for a loonie. At some point in the last decade, it was returned to its native Germany where it now resides in a museum.

Public meeting announcement for rapid transit (City of Vancouver Archives)

Interestingly, the government also had purchased back two former-BCER interurban vehicles from owners in Washington state. These two vehicles are still in Metro Vancouver with one residing in Steveston and the other in Cloverdale.

It wasn’t the first time LRT was proposed nor the last. Almost every planned LRT implementation in Metro Vancouver has turned into some sort of light metro. There is this desire to replicate the Edmonton LRT or Calgary C-Train for some reason.

Perhaps when the City of Vancouver finally implements its street car network we’ll finally have such trains in use in the region once again?

This originally appeared on cohost.org/VancouverTransit but has been moved here due to the site’s shutdown.