Downtown Vancouver’s railway
If you find yourself wandering in and around Chinatown and Gastown, you might notice an alleyway that there is an alleyway that goes on an angle from the port to International Village shopping centre, with its entrance continuing this path towards about where Stadium-Chinatown station stands today.
This is what is left of a railway that connected the Canadian National Railway’s (CNR) yard in what is today Yaletown plus other railway services to the Canadian Pacific (CPR) yard near the Port of Vancouver.
Prior to 1932, the CPR’s only option to reach Burrard Inlet was a pathway that crossed through a cut in Vancouver’s busy city centre. The railway intersected with the busy streets of Pender and Hastings and passed the BC Electric Railway’s downtown terminus at Carrall.
This unsurprising produced a great deal of congestion for the city and railway. The railway needed to get mail, freight, and passengers around quickly and the city wanted fewer accidents. At a cost of CA$1.6 million (or about CA$33 million in 2023), a tunnel was built under Dunsmuir street to then s-curve to an exit at about Burrard Street.
CPR trains could now quickly loop around to their station at what is now Waterfront and no longer have to find themselves at odds with other railway traffic or people.
This tunnel would keep its importance until passenger and freight services to the area ceased in 1982. It would then eventually become the underground portion of the Expo Line we have on the SkyTrain system today.
As for the former surface railway, it had become disused and over time development in the area turned it into a parking lot, a beautified alley, and the main hall of a shopping centre. It seems that both the tunnel and the cut it replaced have survived in their own ways.
This was originally posted to cohost.org/VancouverTransit.
