(CanWest News Service circulated the following story by Darren Bernhardt on October 30.)
SASKATOON, Sask. — A rare locomotive roundhouse that helped establish the town of Biggar nearly 100 years ago is facing demolition, touching off a protest that has reached Parliament Hill.
The circular building, used for servicing and storing locomotives, was constructed by the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway in 1909 and is the last remaining GTPR roundhouse in the world, according to history buffs.
It is so well-preserved “it’s like the railroad just pulled out,” said Biggar resident Tom Cholowski, a conductor with CP Rail and a railway preservationist. “This is one heck of a rare gem. It’s a slice of life, a time capsule of what railroad life was like back then.”
He moved to Biggar a little over a year ago and when he saw the roundhouse, “I nearly had a heart attack because these things just don’t exist anymore,” he said.
Cholowski and Biggar Mayor Ray Sadler have collected in excess of 2,500 signatures — more than the town’s population — on a petition demanding federal protection for the building. Support has also come from railroad societies across the country.
“This means a lot to us and when people get together for something they are passionate about, it becomes an unstoppable force,” said Sadler.
Last week, Conservative MP Carol Skelton tabled a petition in the House of Commons calling on the government to designate the 46,000-square-foot structure a national historic site.
“I wholeheartedly support their campaign,” Skelton told fellow MPs.
The government has a timeline of 45 calendar days to respond.
The roundhouse is capable of holding 21 locomotives, has 40-foot fir beams, more than one million bricks, 18 stalls and recently discovered tunnels, which presumably lead to the rail station. Rumours are the roundhouse is also haunted, Cholowski said.
Some who worked at the roundhouse in the early 1900s have carved their names into the bricks and there are two places where a perfect outline of runaway locomotives that plowed through the wall can be seen.
“You can picture the steam engines pulling in here on their way across the country, carrying Eaton’s houses,” Sadler said. “It’s still so vivid.”
The Biggar settlement owes much to the GTPR, including its name, which comes from William Hodgins Biggar, general counsel for the rail company when the site was chosen for the largest Grand Trunk station in Western Canada.
The town was then made a divisional point, which necessitated the roundhouse and prompted a construction and population boom that solidified Biggar’s place on the Saskatchewan map. While the town thrived, the GTPR was beset by financial troubles and absorbed by CN Rail in 1920.
With the emergence of diesel fuel, most roundhouses fell into disuse and were torn down. Some have been restored for other uses but Biggar’s may be the last in original condition in North America. It was slated for demolition in the 1970s but saved in 1974, when Kevin Kurulak’s family leased it from CN as a turkey barn.
“Their lease runs out in 2009 and now because of a clause in the lease, it is once again slated for demolition,” explained Skelton.
Sadler and Cholowski want to turn it into a museum and have already amassed a collection of artifacts, including the original 1908 blueprints. Original shop equipment and tools have been found in barns around the region while the earth around the site has also given up items such as tools, cans, bricks and train parts. That’s just a cursory search with a metal detector, not an archeological dig, Cholowski said.
CN still owns the land but has no interest in the building, said a spokesperson. It sold the structure to the Kurulak family for $1, but the clause requires the owner to clear away the roundhouse when the lease expires.