Back in the first decade of the 20th century, the train was the principal means of getting around southern Ontario. Few people owned cars, and country roads were not very good. In winter they were almost impassable. Some people would hitch up ol’ Dobbin to the sleigh for local trips, but if you had any distance to travel, the train was the way to go – and Guelph was a railroad centre.
However, travel by rail was not without its risks. For a variety of reasons, not the least being the tight-fisted railway companies’ reluctance to spend money on equipment and well-trained personnel, train wrecks were all too frequent. And then there was the Canadian weather that, at its worst, could even stop a locomotive.
In the first week of February, 1908, a blizzard of record proportions swept across Ontario. The temperature plunged to -30 Fahrenheit (-34 C) and gale-force winds buried Ontario and Quebec, and the states of Michigan and New York with snow. Even the largest communities like Detroit, Toronto, Montreal and New York City were shut down. So was everything in between.
Trains become stuck in snowdrifts as high as 18 feet (5.4 m). Railway snowplows sent out to clear the tracks became bogged down themselves. Brigades of men with snow shovels went out in support of the plows, but often the shovelers had to retreat to the shelter of the workmen’s cars because of frostbite.
Union Station in Toronto was crowded with passengers whose trains couldn’t leave the city. They might have been frustrated, but they were better off than the passengers whose trains had been stranded out in the countryside. Crews had to worry about having enough fuel to keep the cars warm until the trains could get moving again. They served free food to keep the passengers’ spirits up.
Guelph was hard-hit by the storm. Streets were impassable and the street railway was not running. Rural residents who tried to drive wagons or sleighs into Guelph had to turn back. A doctor at the Homewood Sanitarium was barely able to make it from the institution to downtown.
Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Kohl were in Woolwich Township at an auction when the storm struck. They tried to make it back to Guelph through the driving snow, but their horses floundered in the deepening drifts. They finally had to seek shelter for the night at a farmhouse. The next morning Joseph walked the seven miles (11 km) to town along the CPR railway line. In spite of the deep drifts, he arrived safely.
Joseph Lehman of Preston was not so fortunate. He left his home to visit his wife who was caring for her sick mother at her farm near the hamlet of Weisenberg in Woolwich Township. Lehman got as far as Guelph and then learned that no more trains were running. He decided to walk, and got lost in the blizzard. His frozen body was later found in the snow in a field within sight of a farmhouse he’d evidently been trying to reach. The owners of the farm had to keep the body in their barn until the roads were open again.
The situation on the rail line connecting Guelph to Goderich, which had opened the previous August, was one of the worst in the province. “HOPE ABANDONED ON G. & G.; MEN NEARLY FROZEN IN SNOW” said the Feb. 6 headline in the Mercury.
The newspaper reported all attempts to clear the line had been given up because it was “completely at the mercy of the elements.” Between Guelph and Goderich, 11 engines were “dead” on the rails. They were stuck in snow drifts, out of fuel and out of water.
“Several men were nearly frozen between here and Blyth last night,” said the Mercury, “and it is a miracle that any of them still live. They were engaged in shovelling, when the cold became so intense that one man dropped. Unable to get out of the rapidly drifting snow, the others were nearly frozen before their cries attracted other (sic) to the spot. One man was so badly used up that he had to be carried to the nearest farm house, where the warmth soon revived him again.”
Men in another work gang were shovelling snow on a different section of the line. They had gone a long way when, exhausted and freezing, they had to give up and head back to where they had started. They had to tramp through deep snow, because the whole section that they’d shovelled had been filled back in by the blizzard. Over two hundred men were stranded at work stations along the line, with no way of reaching a town and provisions running low.
And the snow kept falling. As the Mercury put it, the snow “swept into every cut, hollow and crevice, filling roads, blocking railroads and tying up traffic. When people thought the storm had blown itself out and had no more snow left to dump on the land, the wind suddenly shifted and began to drive the fallen snow in the opposite direction. Then, just to make things worse, the temperature rose and then dropped again, leaving a hard crust on top of the deep snow.
Not until Feb. 10 was the line between Guelph and Goderich cleared. It took a small army of men with snow shovels to do it. The Mercury reported on Feb. 11, “… in all their experience in Canadian storms they never saw one where the snow was so deep and crusted so hard. Every foot had to be picked.”
Even though the main G & G line was finally clear, there were still locomotives stranded on branch lines, and men in work stations who wouldn’t be able to go home until the trains were moving again. As the station agent in Guelph said, “This is railroading.”
