Rivers / Daly Heritage / Interpretive Signs

Sign #4:  The Yards



A view of the yards.




The Shops



Some 250 to 300 men were employed in Rivers during the early railroad operations at this point. Pictured here are some members of the machine department.





An aerial view.



A busy workplace.




Yard Engine and Coal Dock.


The Final Years

The era of the steam locomotive was coming to an end in the early 1950’s.  New diesel engines were faster and stronger. They didn’t require the types of local maintenance that the roundhouse and yards had been providing. For a time these new engines used local makeshift facilities in the roundhouse, but soon new liquid fuel tanks replaced the coal dock and the roundhouse was no longer vital to operations.

Rivers was still a busy place. No less than twenty-eight crews (one hundred and forty men) were operating between this point between Winnipeg and Melville. An  average of sixty carloads of ballast material were being taken from the railway's gravel pit on a daily basis as road beds needed constant attention.

But what we today call “downsizing” was inevitable. In 1954 twenty-three men - four roundhouse and eighteen car-department employees - received termination notices from the Canadian National.
Another result of the increasing advances in locomotive technology was that railway operations became centralized, and as a result the divisional point was transferred to Terrace, and eventually all maintenance was relocated to Prince George, BC and Edmonton, Alberta.

In 1958 the railway removed the sixty-foot high smokestack landmark above the roundhouse. In 1961 it was sold to Structural Fabricators Ltd. Which opened for business in the location the next year.