Harvie Rd. and Surrey’s Lost Railway
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.
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.
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.
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.
