Canadian National's Thornton Yard in 1968, before most of the Port Mann townsite (top-right) was enveloped by further expansions. The yard was named after Sir Henry Thornton, CN's president from 1922 to 1932, an American who was general superintendent of the Long Island Railroad before arriving in England to oversee troop movements during World War I, for which he was knighted.

The barge being loaded alongside the chip plant spur (center-left) was the original site of the facility that serviced CN's Vancouver Island trackage. The twin-stack steam railway car ferry Canora, brought from Quebec to Vancouver via the Panama Canal in 1919, operated between the Fraser River and Vancouver Island for 48 years. The two-funneled, 308-foot steamer required a crew of 40 and had a capacity of 17 railway cars, including passenger accommodations which were never used.

Scenes from Port Mann

Beyond the arch of the Port Mann Bridge -- completed in 1964 as part of the TransCanada highway -- is Douglas Island, with the mouth of the Pitt River (traversed by the CP main line further upstream) to the distant left of the island; beyond the log boom is the smaller Tree Island where the Coquitlam River meets the Fraser. Port Mann's original "seaport" dock was located just downstream of the bridge's first foundation nearest the river. The green belt to the right including that beyond the bridge is now gone, replaced by more rails. Just out of distance of the green belt are the steep uplands which forced the New Westminster Southern Railway to skirt the Fraser River up to Port Kells before heading south to the international boundary.

From 1891 to 1916 the Great Northern's NWSR ran along the Fraser River here before the 8.5 mile section from east Brownsville to Port Kells was purchased by the Canadian Northern Railway as the western terminus of its transcontinental. With the construction of the New Westminster Bridge and the Vancouver, Westminster & Yukon Railway in 1904 this was part of GN's main line from Seattle to Vancouver until 1909, when the coastal route along Semiahmoo Bay replaced it. Before the New Westminster Bridge was built passengers were ferried across the Fraser River from Brownsville to New Westminster where the Westminster & Vancouver Tramway Company's interurban reached Vancouver. (The tramway, built shortly after the NWSR in 1891, later would become part of the British Columbia Electric Railway.) Passengers, those destined for eastern Canada, could also go to the CP station in New Westminster, situated almost directly across from the terminus of the NWSR. The CP line to New Westminster, then the principal city on the mainland of British Columbia, was completed in 1887, the same time regular service began on their main line to the newly named mill town of Vancouver.

Brownsville, initially called Brown's Landing, was named after Ebenezer Brown, a New Westminster liquor merchant who in the 1860's pre-empted land on the south shore of the Fraser opposite New Westminster. Located at the end of the Semiahmoo Trail, Yale Road, and Scott Road, Brownsville would grow to include hotels, stores, livery stables, wharves and eventually a railway. The area was named South Westminster after a strip of land along the Fraser had been ceded to New Westminster in the 1880's so that a steam ferry could connect the two shores (the land would return to the jurisdiction of Surrey Municipality in the 1920's).

A View Towards Brownsville

Port Mann Townsite and Area

During the 1860's Bon Accord was a rough landing for steamboats to take on cordwood for the journey upriver to Fort Langley and Yale (the end of navigable waters on the Fraser). The small pioneer community, located on the deeper south shore of the Fraser near the confluence of two rivers and a salmon-bearing creek, would become a flagstop on the NWSR and later have a post office. In 1882, before the railway came, Bon Accord was the site of the first hatchery in Canada to raise Pacific salmon, later to become the Dominion Salmon Hatchery. A sternwheeler by the name of Bon Accord plied the waters of the Fraser until 1898, when she burned during the Great Fire of New Westminster which destroyed the city.

Just out of view of the photograph are the old Canadian Northern shops, built ca. 1913 shortly before the Great Northern officially abandoned the NWSR from Port Kells and sold the right-of-way to the fledgling Canadian Northern transcontinental. The shops, demolished in 1977 during a major expansion of Thornton Yard, were built on land originally owned by T.J. Trapp, a prominent New Westminster businessman and Secretary of the NWSR.

Old Rails at Port Mann

Liverpool, less than half a mile west of the entrance to Thornton Yard, was the site of the Great Northern's dock (part of its extensive marine system), 50-car siding and wye. When the New Westminster Bridge was completed in 1904, the line ascended the new bridge to Fraser River Junction, bypassing Brownsville and the ferry across to New Westminster.

In 1911 the name Bon Accord was officially changed to Port Mann, after Sir Donald Mann (pictured), co-builder -- with Sir William Mackenzie -- of the Canadian Northern Railway which was already across the prairies and snaking its way through the mountains to the west coast. Mann and Mackenzie, knighted in 1911, were railway contractors who first met in 1884 during construction of the CP in British Columbia. They would eventually form the Canadian Northern Railway in 1899, and by 1902 had trackage in Manitoba, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Minnesota.

Unlike in British Columbia, where the CP and GN were bitter rivals, friendly alliances in Manitoba were formed early on, with James Jerome Hill stating that his Northern Pacific Railway (which he had wrested control by the turn of the century) would not compete with the CNoR in the province. Most of the Northern Pacific's branch lines in Manitoba were added to CNoR time tables in 1901, the same year that Mann and Mackenzie sold the charter of the VV&E to the GN because government funding was not forthcoming for the railway's construction.

Like all of its lines GN would build the VV&E without subsidy; Mann and Mackenzie would have to wait until 1910 when the government of British Columbia backed construction of the Canadian Northern Pacific Railway, the fourth major component of the CNoR transcontinental (by 1905 the line between Winnipeg and Edmonton was completed). The early alliances forged by the GN and CNoR in Manitoba and Minnesota would be even stronger in the Fraser Valley, continuing long after the CNoR was absorbed into the government-owned Canadian National Railways (now privatized and known as Canadian National Railway).

Canadian Northern Railway in western Canada, 1917
Select for a full-size view (943 x 345; 54K)

January 23, 1915: The last spike of the CNoR at Basque, British Columbia. A ribbon of rail joined the Fraser River to the St. Lawrence in eastern Canada.

Port Mann was supposed to become a city of 25,000 inhabitants. It never came close to that population or became the port as envisioned here. (Select for a full-size view: 507 x 735; 48K)