The story behind the ‘town that never was’
A piece of Ottawa history hidden for almost 100 years off Hunt Club Road was quietly buried recently to make room for a mall parking lot. It was called Rideau Yard and it was the nucleus of a town that never was.
Ottawa at one time had a number of railway roundhouses, including one at 300 West Hunt Club Rd. The site, concealed for a century in a vacant industrial lot near Antares Drive, had been our last roundhouse location to survive development.
I noticed the remains of the site when I saw a large circular pit in a vacant field. With some research, I learned it was a remnant of a large railway station and century-old ghost town called “Rideau Yard” that was built in 1915.
Constructed by the Canadian Northern Railway company, Rideau Yard opened with great expectations of handling both freight and passenger rail traffic passing between Quebec and Vancouver on the newly constructed TransContinental Rail line. This grand, new station south of Ottawa was an ambitious development that housed an 80-foot turntable and a 15-stall roundhouse, where steam locomotives were maintained. Later re-named Federal Yard, it was to be the epicentre for Ottawa’s newest suburb, boasting a summer hotel and residential streets mapped out close to the Rideau River.
Yet this vision of a new town south of Ottawa never came to fruition and eventually fell into financial troubles. Canadian Northern Railway shut down Rideau Yard and the dreams of their south Ottawa development came to an end in 1922.
The hotel was being used by railway employees instead of visiting passengers, and the roundhouse and other auxiliary buildings were demolished some time around 1930. Their ruins became cloaked in overgrowth up until last month when it was finally buried to make way for a new mall.
I had wanted to document what was left of this century-old railway station before it was lost forever. A 1980 edition of the Bytown Railway Society publication “Branch Line” included a series of maps and recollections by former employees. This helped me reconstruct what may have been there.
On the site, there was a vast area of roundhouse ruins with railway artifacts strewn about. An aerial image from the National Air Photo Library clearly shows the outline of the old roundhouse building and the turntable.
Bricks from the roundhouse, pieces of twisted metal and other remnants of the lost station have now been buried under the development, which according to the Trinity Development Group website plan, will now become a Sandman Hotel.
When I explored the area last November, the turntable’s open pit and centre pivot structure were concealed under a cover of vegetation but it was easy to imagine a once bustling railway station and steam locomotives trundling on their way in and out of Ottawa on the TransContinental line.
Using the similar roundhouse and turntable complex that was restored and is currently maintained by Toronto’s Railway Museum and the Steam Whistle Brewery in Toronto for comparison, we can visualize what Ottawa’s Rideau Yard station may have looked like when it was in operation 100 years ago.
Once labelled the most contaminated site in Ottawa, this “brownfield” property is now owned by Toronto’s Unitrin and Triform Developments, which were given a grant from the City of Ottawa to deal with the contaminated land.
With Trinity’s new development, it looks like the centuryold dream of a busy commercial centre on the property will finally be realized. History has come full circle.