Canadian railway heritage in Ottawa

The stations and impressive hotels of the Canadian Railways are woven into the fabric of the country. You can’t miss the French Gothic Revival styled Château Laurier (1912), a former railway hotel, which sits right at the heart of the city, next to Parliament and opposite the old Union Station. Today, it is a luxury hotel with a hefty prices.

Union Station in Ottawa had a relatively short life as a railway station, from 1912 until 1966, but after its closure found new life as a Centennial visitors centre (1967), a Canadian government conference centre (1969) and then as the temporary home for the Senate of Canada (2019) after a six year rehabilitation programme. The Senate will remain here while Parliament is being refurbished. The exterior of the building cuts an impressive sight with its Beaux Arts styling.

The Senate of Canada (formerly Union Station Ottawa)

We joined a guided tour of the Senate of Canada building. Once inside you are immediately struck by how vast the departures hall was back in its heyday, despite the adaptations for its new role. Apparently the Baths of Caracalla in Rome were an inspiration for the design.

Across the tour it was fascinating to see how it has been adapted with the occasional nod to its past life, such as a single original mahogany bench in the lobby (one of 12 that used to sit in the departures hall, donated by the Canada Science and Technology Museum) and a railway scene engraved in some of the bronze panelling (showing a steam hauled train crossing a wooden trestle bridge on Vancouver island).

The Senate chamber (known as the red chamber) now occupies part of the concourse with the same amount of floorspace as the permanent Senate chamber (309 square metres) but a slightly lower ceiling (10m rather than 12.5m). Some of the artworks that you would see in the permanent home of the Senate have moved across here, such as a striking portrait of Queen Elizabeth II in a yellow dress (1957) by Lilias Torrance Newton and a portrait of a young Queen Victoria (1842) that has been saved from four fires, including the huge fire in 1916 that destroyed the central block of the Canadian Parliament.

The impressive ceiling of the old departures hall

Finally, a visit to the Canada Science and Technology Museum presented some of the astonishing mechanical beasts that once roamed the Canadian railway network.

On display at the museum are CP2858, a Hudson class steam locomotive (Montreal Locomotive Works, 1938); CN6400, a sleek streamlined steam locomotive (Montreal Locomotive Works, 1936) and solve survivor of the U4-A class; CP3100, one of two experimental K1-A class steam locomotive’s built (CPR Angus Shops Montreal, 1928); and CP926, one of over 500 D-10 class locomotives commissioned (CPR Angus Shops Montreal, 1911). CN 6200 (Montreal Locomotive Works, 1942) is also plinthed outside. It’s well worth a trip out from the city centre to see these leviathans.

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Highlights from Ottawa

Ottawa is one of those cities that impresses the moment you first start wandering, with the stunning sight of the Canadian Parliament in all its gothic revival glory (albeit with the addition of some hoardings and cranes as it undergoes a $3 billion, 20-year renovation), the grand old railway hotel of Château Laurier and the former Union Station (interim home to the Senate of Canada).

Over the course of three and a half days in the Canadian capital we visited five museums and one art gallery, as well as joining two guided tours. Ottawa is rightly known for its national museums and these were the best that we visited in our stay in Canada, far surpassing anything we saw in Montreal. These were the highlights from our trip:

National War Memorial

The National War Memorial, officially titled ‘The Response’, depicts twenty-two larger than life Canadian servicemen with two horses hauling a 18-pound gun through an arch topped by allegorical figures of peace and freedom. It’s one of the most striking war memorials that I have seen and really shows how well the incredible efforts of the sculptors to pursue historical accuracy has paid off in their depiction of the Canadian forces.

National War Memorial (with Parliament in the background)

The design for the memorial was chosen from 127 entries submitted to a public competition in 1925. The winning sculptor was Vernon March (1891-1930), whose work on the Lewes War Memorial we admired last year. Sadly, he never got to see his work completed, succumbing to pneumonia in June 1930. The work on the monument was continued by Vernon’s siblings, who saw it through to its official unveiling by King George VI on 21st May 1939.

The central hall of the Canadian War Museum holds the original scale model produced in plaster (along with the original models of other significant monuments, such as the St Julien and Vimy Ridge memorials).

National Gallery of Canada

We almost skipped the National Art Gallery which would have been a colossal error of judgment. The gallery proved to be quite wonderful with a superb collection of Canadian art, some impressive displays of modern art and one of the most incredible sound sculptures I have ever experienced.

The sound sculpture in question can be found in the relocated interior of the Rideau Chapel (1887-88) which was rebuilt piece by piece when the convent building that housed it was demolished in the 1970s. It is extraordinary in its own right as the only example of a Tudor-style fan vaulted ceiling from this period in North America.

Rideau Chapel, inside the National Gallery of Canada

Step inside the chapel and you might wonder what the fuss is about, but then 40 speakers set up around the chapel start to play forty separately recorded parts of “Spem in Alium” by Thomas Tallis. You can wander around the chapel marvelling at the performances of individual singers. I think that the creator, Janet Cardiff, absolutely succeeded in allowing spellbound visitors to be “able to climb into the music.” I was awestruck the first time round and then had to go back to experience it all over again before we left the gallery.

Other highlights included Alex Colville’s To Prince Edward Island (1965); Ibrahim Mahama’s installation Non-Orientable Nkansa II (2017) imposing wall of scrap materials from Ghanaian migrants; the extraordinary landscape paintings of Lawren S. Harris; Alma Duncan’s Army women in warehouse (1943); and the abstract paintings of Bertram Brooker, an artist who was born in Croydon, England in 1888.

Canadian Museum of History

The Canadian Museum of history in Gatineau proved to be another marvellous day out. We spent a good three hours there and still wasn’t anywhere near enough time to see everything. The first impression you get of the museum is quite extraordinary with the soaring spectacle of the world’s largest collection of totem poles, followed by the painted dome of the Haida Gwaii Salon and a fascinating series of displays about Canada’s indigenous peoples (especially the really striking reverence and respect of the Inuit people for the whale).

Morning Star (Alex Janvier, 1993) in the Canadian Museum of History

In the extensive Canadian History hall you get an incredible walkthrough of 15,000 years of history illustrated by 1,500 historical artifacts that takes you through the French and English eras again, reveals unexpected Ukrainian connections (including a complete Ukrainian church from 1915 reconstructed inside the gallery) and bring you up to date with modern history (particularly around the national debate around a new flag, the fractious campaign for independence and the October crisis of 1970 – all of which was largely unknown to me).

A jukebox section provided a welcome opportunity to play some of the most important pieces of modern Canadian music. Soon enough the strains of If You Could Read My Mind by Canadian legend Gordon Lightfoot were filling the hall.

Royal Canadian Mint

I wasn’t sure quite what to expect from a tour as the website doesn’t give much away and there are no photographs to give you an idea, but was absolutely fascinated by the processes that we were shown as we made our way along a high level enclosed walkway that looks down on the factory floor.

There are video screens along the route that the tour guides can use to show the processes that go on here, but we were lucky to be visiting on a day when so much was going on and these proved unnecessary in many spots along the route. We could watch workers in their safety gear handling molten metal; bars and gold coils being lifted by machinery; and an array of stamping, sorting and quality checking processes. So much better than the website hinted at.

The guided tour also highlights some of the output in displays along the route, including special issue coins and medals. It was impressive to see the list of countries that the Royal Canadian Mint produce coins for. Overall, this was absolutely fascinating and the tour is well worth booking.

Canadian War Museum

The Canadian War Museum, located on LeBreton Flats (a short walk from Pimisi tram stop), occupies a really striking angled concrete and glass building with a green roof. It looks deceptively slender and flat on the outside, but once inside it seems to expand at every turn you take.

The Canadian War Museum

The four galleries on the main level are exhaustive in their coverage of the wars involving Canada and Canadian forces. I was particularly fascinated by the pre-colonisation history and coverage of the French and British invasions of which I realised I knew very little. One display documenting the Fenian incursions in the 1860s delighted me as this ties in to my family history.

The Fenians were Irish-American veterans of the civil war who planned to capture Canada from the British and trade it for Irish independence. In April 1866 the Royal Navy helped fend off a Fenian attack on Campobello Island and Fenian forces made further raids until the movement collapsed in 1871. One of my family, my 2x great grand-uncle Ernest Lionel Carpenter, was serving on HMS Niger, which docked in Quebec in September 1866. Ernest was transferred for one and a half months to the gunboat Hercules searching ships off the coast of Canada while the Fenian threat remained.

There was so much information to absorb. I learnt quite a bit about the Canadian experience during my visit which included displays covering, amongst many other topics: the collision of convoy ships in Halifax harbour, resulting in one of the largest explosions in history and a horrendous loss of life; the factory work to keep munitions coming during WW2; the catastrophic Dieppe raid of 1942; the battle of Ortona in 1943; and the liberation of the Netherlands. In short – don’t underestimate the time that you need for a visit!

I was fascinated to learn about the controversial artwork Canada’s Golgotha (1918) by Francis Derwent Wood depicting a Canadian soldier crucified on a barn door, a much disputed episode that was capitalised on by propagandists, but never proven. I’ve heard the story before in books about the First World War, but hadn’t appreciated just how much international tension had been generated by this artwork. It had been withdrawn from exhibition in 1919 and had effectively been banned from display until the 1990s. As the display text points out, it stands testament to the intensity of wartime myths and imagery whether true or not.

The thorough coverage of Canada’s post 1945 involvement in peacekeeping was highly detailed. It struck me that most museums of this type skip over this with a couple of displays, but here you had a whole gallery devoted to it – so quite unusual but really interesting.

Artworks can be found throughout the museum. Among the pieces that I particularly admired were the paintings by Norman Wilkinson and Frederick Challener of the grand armada of 1914, depicting the moment when over 30 passenger liners sailed from Canada in October 1914 carrying 32,000 soldiers; C. R. W. Nevinson’s painting The Roads of France ‘A,B,C,D’ from 1917, showing the endless lines of war traffic; and William Ogilvie’s painting of Assoro, capturing the moment that Canadian troops entered the town on 22nd July 1943 after a steep mountain assault.

The original half-size plaster casts for the figures on the Vimy Ridge memorial

The lower level of the museum, the LeBreton Gallery, contains an astonish array of military equipment from the humble mobile food canteen to the supersonic McDonnell F-101 Voodoo fighter jet. Even if tech is not your thing it’s still worth exploring this level as it also contains the original half-size plaster casts for the figures on the Vimy Ridge memorial, some rescued war memorials, nose art salvaged from Halifax bombers and some extraordinary art works (including a painting showing Edward VIII at the unveiling of the Vimy Ridge memorial and Richard Jack’s painting The Taking of Vimy Ridge, Easter Monday 1917 from 1919). One of the more remarkable pieces is an unfinished masterpiece by Augustus John titled ‘The Canadians Opposite Lens‘ which has been restored – despite the previous owner cutting it in half and inserting a doorway through it!

All of this was quite incredible enough, but the Memorial Hall is something else. It’s a striking simple concrete room with a single headstone, from the First World War grave of Canada’s unknown soldier. The hall has been designed so that on the 11th hour of Armistice day the rays of the sun perfectly illuminate the headstone.

The grave of former Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier

In addition to these sights, we visited the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum and the Bank of Canada museum; admired the massive steam locomotives and the world’s first synthesiser at the Canada Science and Technology Museum; took in a superb guided tour of the interim home of the Senate (which I’ll cover in another post); stopped by the grave of former Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier at Notre-Dame Cemetery and admired the impressive Rideau Canal. There were also some super meals at Play, Sidedoor and Coconut Lagoon.

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Tulips in Ottawa

Our arrival in Ottawa coincided with the Canadian Tulip Festival, an annual event that celebrates the role that Canadian forces played in the liberation of the Netherlands in the Second World War, remembering the 7,500 Canadian lives lost in that campaign. It is also an acknowledgment of the safe haven that Canada provided for the Dutch royal family during wartime.

The Dutch royal family were evacuated on 13th May 1940 following the German invasion a few days earlier. Queen Wilhelmina led the Dutch government-in-exile from London, while her daughter, Princess Juliana, was sent to Canada in June 1940 to protect the line of succession. In 1943 a maternity suite of the Ottawa Civic Hospital was temporarily designated as part of the Netherlands so Princess Margriet could be born with full Dutch citizenship.

Tulips in Ottawa

Princess Juliana gave 100,000 tulip bulbs to Canada after the war. Ever since then the Dutch royal family have sent 10,000 tulip bulbs to Canada every year. The Tulip festival was conceived in 1953 and has since grown into the largest public tulip display in the world. Over one million tulips are now planted in Ottawa every year.

Tulips could be seen everywhere we went in Ottawa (notably at Major’s Hill Park, Jacques-Cartier Park and around the National War Memorial) but the centrepiece of the festival was a vast display at Commissioners Park (a short hop out from the centre by rail replacement bus while O-train line 2 is closed for extension works).

We visited Commissioners Park a couple of evenings before the official opening, joining large crowds who had come to admire the spectacular displays. It was hard to believe how far the tulips stretched, far beyond our immediate line of sight. The tulips are planted in huge beds that follow a trend introduced in the 1950s to allow for easy viewing by cars passing by on Queen Elizabeth driveway. Although we had allowed plenty of time we hadn’t quite accounted for the sheer scale of the displays and only just managed to see everything before the sun set!

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Canadian citybreaking

A long-delayed birthday celebration, deferred from the days of the pandemic, saw us land in Montreal on Monday night, before travelling on by train to Ottawa.

The day flight from London was pretty smooth, with some impressive views down the St Lawrence River as we came in to land at 7.40pm, an impressive 35 minutes early. After a long trundle to our stand we disembarked into a pretty empty terminal and made swift progress until my baggage was randomly selected for secondary screening. It was all very friendly – though the customs officer at the screening asked if I had OCD when he saw all my paperwork I had prepared for the trip! No, I am just a well prepared librarian…

Stone bas-relief artwork in the concourse at Montreal station

After a good night’s sleep at a city centre hotel we made our way over to the Gare Centrale in Montreal for a scheduled 2 hour ride along “the corridor” (the route connecting Windsor, London, Toronto, Kingston, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City) to Ottawa. The station, opened in 1943, was built in art deco style with impressive stone bas-relief artworks reflecting Canadian life at each end of the concourse. I managed to grab a couple of phone shots of the station and its stylish art before the security guard on duty asked us to stop.

As we had been able to book a long way in advance we were able to get modestly priced, discounted, tickets for business class, affording us a few comforts while we were still adjusting to Canadian time.

The business lounge opened just after we arrived (5.30) and gave us a comfortable space to wait for our train (you are generally asked to arrive 45 minutes before departure) with free self-serve soft or hot drinks. Boarding was announced in the lounge (6.00) and a VIA Rail staffer led us out to a separate business class entry. Tickets are scanned before passengers are allowed down the escalator to platform level where we were directed to coach no 1, directly behind the loco.

Our motive power for the journey would be provided by one of around 50 GM diesel-electric locomotives (GMD F40PH-2) that make up the majority of the VIA Rail fleet, specifically VIA 6438 (originally built 1989, re-built 2011). I can’t stress how much bigger these beasts are to the locomotives you might encounter in the UK – around two foot wider and 3 foot taller than a class 66. Very impressive.

Seats in the business class carriage were mostly arranged on a 2-1 arrangement, airline style, with a galley and luggage rack at one end and two toilets at the other. Once we were on board the bilingual VIA Rail Team went round to anyone sitting at an emergency exit window to talk them through the procedures for breaking the window in case this was necessary, much like you might expect on a plane. It all seemed a bit more serious than the UK train experience!

Business breakfast on VIA Rail

Shortly after departure (6:20) the crew came round and served juice and coffee, followed by a hot meal around 40 minutes later. The menu of the day presented a choice of a hot quiche or continental breakfast (both served with a bagel, fruit and more juice). It hit the spot perfectly.

The ride was quite enjoyable, if a little jolty at times, giving us some great views of the countryside. The blaring horn at rural level crossings was like something out of American movies. It was great!! We could follow our progress using the VIA rail app using the on-board WiFi, which showed us our current position on a map; current speed; time to next stop, plus scheduled and revised times for each of the next stops.

It was going so well, but then we stopped unexpectedly, just outside Casselman (around 50km out from Ottawa) while the engineers made a visual inspection of the track ahead of us. Then, we were told there was a problem with engine and that a maintenance crew had been dispatched to Casselman, our next stop, to fix it. On arrival at Casselman those plans changed again and it was announced that we would continue on with this engine to Ottawa.

Our GMD F40PH-2 (VIA 6438) at Ottawa

In the end we arrived at Ottawa around 30 minutes late. We were happy to have reached our final destination but travellers bound for Toronto were given the unwelcome news that the train would be terminated there and that everyone was to disembark. For us, we just needed to make a short journey on the O-Train (Ottawa’s light rail system) to the city centre and check in to our hotel, the Novotel Ottawa City Centre.

Soon enough we were out and about, soaking up the warmth of an unusually warm spring day and getting our first glimpse of the marvellous architecture of the Canadian capital.