Victoria Saanich New Westminster Railway Company

By Sally Butterfield

Archivist

BC Archives Acquisition Documents Forgotten Railway Dreams

In late 2019, the BC Archives was offered a black metal trunk practically bursting with a mess of papers. These had once belonged to the Victoria Saanich New Westminster Railway Company (VSNW). Some of the records were neatly bound together, while others were crumpled and stuffed in wherever there was room. There was absolutely no discernible order to the mess, and each individual piece of paper was coated with a film of dirt.

The trunk that contained the VSNW records. Before these records can be made accessible to the public, they will need to be treated by the paper conservator and processed by an archivist. Minimal information is available about the history of the company, and reports in the Daily Colonist and the Canada Gazette are often contradictory. Each document will need to be examined to determine how it fits into the context of the company.

Although their provenance and custodial history is unknown, the records appear to be a fairly complete representation of the Victoria Saanich New Westminster Railway Company and its efforts to build a rail link between downtown Victoria and New Westminster, connecting Victoria to the trans-Canada railway. A brief survey of the records shows that the records consist of financial account books, letterhead, board of management minutes and correspondence, drafts of the private bill to incorporate the company, company bylaws, and maps.

A railway that linked Victoria to the rest of Canada was a promise of Confederation and, for Amor de Cosmos, the founder and president of the company, a particular sticking point. After the rail line was seemingly abandoned by the federal government, de Cosmos created the company to do what the federal government either could not or would not.

The company was incorporated in 1891 by a private bill put forward to the Parliament of Canada. Multiple copies of the draft bill can be found among the records, each copy including notations of individuals involved in the project, including John Stuart Yates in Victoria and J.A. Gemmill, the company’s representative in Ottawa. It is interesting that the company was incorporated at the federal rather than the provincial level, and it perhaps indicates that de Cosmos envisioned this project as holding national significance—it would link Victoria not just with mainland British Columbia, but with the rest of the country. De Cosmos had previously incorporated the Victoria Saanich Railway Company in 1886 at the provincial level. The route between Victoria and Saanich would be identical, but this earlier company had no ambitions to connect to the mainland.

Some of the maps included with the records.

AMOR DE COSMOS

Amor de Cosmos was born William Alexander Smith in 1825 in Windsor, Nova Scotia. He came to Victoria in 1858 and founded the British Colonist that same year. He used his newspaper to launch his political career and was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Vancouver Island in 1863. He continued to hold various political positions through the colonial period and after Confederation. He was a strong proponent of Confederation and pushed for Victoria to be the rail terminus of the trans-Canada railway, but his legacy is marked by his antiChinese and anti-Indigenous racism. He died in Victoria in 1897. De Cosmos devised a rail link that would operate from central Victoria to New Westminster via a ferry link at Swartz Bay, and that would carry passengers, without the need to transfer, from one city to the next in under three hours. He had meticulously plotted the route, attended land auctions and solicited quotes for steamers capable of transporting railway cars. The plan was presented to Victoria mayor and City Council by de Cosmos as follows, according to the Daily Colonist for March 13, 1892:

“When the road was built and in working order, people could get from Victoria to New Westminster, over a route 68 miles in length, in two hours and thirty-three minutes, or, leaving out stoppages, two hours and four minutes. Of this travelling, there would be 45 miles on land and 23 on water. For water transit, fast and handsome steamers, capable of making twenty miles an hour, were to be put on. In addition to these, there were to be transit vessels, capable of carrying forty railway cars, thus doing away with the necessity of transhipment.

The items making up the total amount to be expended on the whole line of rail and ferry service were:

SIXTY-SIX AND ONE-HALF MILES $91,200 BLAINE BRANCH $243,000 VANCOUVER BRANCH $243,000 MAIN LINE AND BRANCHES $1,295,000 CANOE PASS $108,000 THE POINT $200,000 The total amount of cash to be expended was $1,703,000.”

It was not long after incorporation of VSNW that plans began to falter. The company was unable to secure the necessary capital for the project, and the funding that de Cosmos depended on at the municipal, provincial and federal levels did not materialize. Although we could not find a corporate dissolution document, the records do not date far beyond 1893. It was not until June 1960 that de Cosmos’s vision of a link between the Saanich Peninsula and the mainland would be realized with the construction of the BC Ferries terminal at Swartz Bay.