Passengers grew old and feeble when cows held up the railway

Friday, 16 July 2010 00:00

One hundred years ago: clippings from the newspapers of July 16, 1910.

Lindsay Post (July 17). When cows held up the Whitby, Port Perry and Lindsay Railway, passengers became old and feeble waiting for it to restart, Walt Mason writes in the Post. Also known as the Nip and Tuck because of its precarious existence, the WPP&LRR reached Lindsay in 1876 after a couple of changes in name and plans, the second of eight railways to serve the city.

Mason writes:
In the early days of that road there was a train about once a week. It was hauled by an apoplectic locomotive with a funnel like the crater of a volcano. In those days a locomotive was considered a poor excuse if its smokestack wasn’t as large an ordinary barn.

They used to feed that old locomotive with cord wood, and when the supply of wood ran out, the timetable was suspended until the conductor and brakeman cut down a tree and whacked it up into four-foot lengths. Riding on that railway was considered an extra hazardous business, and if a man was seen boarding it, his insurance policies were cancelled.

I rode on it to Port Perry one time. The regular passenger coach had [been] left at Whitby, where it was being loaded with fish, and the passengers had to ride on a flat car. There was a place called the “deep cut” a few miles north of Brooklin, and when the train got there it was found that a lot of the cattle were on the track. The conductor and the brakeman got off the train to drive them away, and then the owner of the cows loomed up and claimed they had a perfect right to stay in that cut if they wanted to, and if the railway brakemen made a pass at them he’d go to law.

So the case was carried to the lower courts, and later to the higher courts, and the passengers grew old and feeble, waiting for the train to start, and the cows lay down on the track and died of old age, and finally the great-grandson of the conductor took charge and ran the train to Port Perry. When I left Brooklin, I was a child in pinafores, and when I got to Port Perry I had to go to a barber for a shave, and he charged me for a hair cut.

LIQUOR LOSS
Windsor Record. “Canada’s per capita consumption of distilled spirits last year was 0.85 of a gallon, or about four-fifths. Somebody didn’t get his share.”

PRINCE RUPERT TOO CIVILIZED
Victoria Colonist. Prince Rupert, “the newest coast city of Canada,” has become much too civilized, an anonymous poet writes:

They’ve broken in the Northland And they’ve made it bally tame. They’ve bottle fed the mountains, And there’s nothin’ seems the same. They’re buildin’ reg’lar ho-tels, Where the folks is all dressed fine. And there’re getting’ banks and autos; There’s a laundry down the line. People go to church on Sunday To the hammerin’ of chimes. An’ they’ve even turned on poker, An they canned the good old times. Why, Rupert’s so blamed civilized, It’s me for other climes.