Rooted In Railroading

Billowing smoke and sputtering black soot generously showered the cheering group of spectators eagerly awaiting its arrival as it slowly and noisily lumbered into the local train station in the fall of 1856.

To Belleville residents it was a much-anticipated event that would forever drastically alter the history of the community’s progress.

The joyful news was first reported in the Oct. 31 edition of the Hastings Chronicle that year.

"Belleville has at last been placed upon the great highway of the Province by the opening of the Grand Trunk Railway. The first regular trains from the East extending to Portland in Maine, through Montreal, and from Stratford, West, being 855 miles, made their first stop in our good Town, on Monday last, to the no small pleasure and gratification of the of a large number of our citizens."

This was an event that laid the foundation for the enormous role railroading would eventually play in the lives of the people in the area. Local farmers benefited greatly from the opening of the new means of transportation that would help them get their product to greater distances any time of the year and in a way never before experienced by their ancestors who had also worked the land for their living. The arrival of the locomotive brought with it an introduction to a way of life that soon pervaded the very fabric of this community when, soon after, Belleville became a divisional headquarters for the Canadian National Railway transforming the town into an important railway community.

In 1910, a 41-stall roundhouse was built at the Belleville railway yard providing more employment opportunities to local men looking to work in railroading. Alongside them were members of the train crew that used to work at the little York roundhouse that closed in 1905.

According to Keith Hansen, author of Last Trains From Lindsay, and a railroad historian living in Warkworth Ontario, the 1910 Belleville roundhouse was predated by the original Grand Trunk "roundhouse" which was square and completely closed.

"It was sited south of the present VIA station and I believe it was the lower part of one wall of that structure which, for many years, deceptively appeared to be a stone fence wall on the north side of the street just west of the VIA station. A second "roundhouse" was added to the east of the first. With engine size growing by leaps and bounds those two buildings became untenable leading to the construction of the 1910 facility."

The 1910 structure was at one time in the form of a complete circle with an entrance space on each of the west and east sides. "Its function, like that of the other roundhouses on the CNR system, was to provide for the daily repairs and maintenance necessary to keep locomotives available for their duties. It wasn’t fitted to do major overhauls. That kind of work was done in CNR shops located in Moncton, New Brunswick, Point St. Charles in Montreal, Stratford, Ontario and Transcona, east of Winnipeg, Manitoba. The largest roundhouse on the whole CNR system was at Turcot west of downtown Montreal."

Larger engines came along and the need for all the existing stalls declined with time. Some of the stalls on the south side were taken down by 1953, he noted.

Steam trains passed into history when replaced by diesels in the early 50s. Since diesel engines did not require the same amount of maintenance as the coal-fired trains did, many city residents working in the railway lost their jobs when the final switch was made. The transition eventually sounded a death knell for the roundhouse, a precious inheritance from the heydays of railroading in Belleville in the 1930s. Major demolition of the roundhouse began in December 1960, leaving behind just nine stalls. Part of the roundhouse and the turntable existed until recently and were completely taken down in 1997. The existing railway station in Belleville is what remains of the building constructed in 1855 and is, today, one of the only two original Grand Trunk Railway stations left in the province today. The other one is in Prescott, Ontario.