The railway came to Belleville in the 1850's. As the
Intelligencer of the day put it:
"Belleville has at last been placed upon the great highway by
the opening of the Grand Trunk Railway. The event is one of the
utmost importance to us as a town. Merchants and tradesmen no
longer will have to lay in a heavy six months' stock of supplies
until the season arrives for navigation."
October 27, 1856, the day the first train passed through
Belleville, was a gala occasion. Crowds lined the tracks long
before the train, consisting of two wood-burning locomotives
and ten passenger cars, was due to steam into the Grand Trunk
depot on Station Street (now CN Station) on its initial
Toronto-Montreal run. The mayor of Belleville was on hand to
greet Grand Trunk officials and dignitaries aboard the
history-making train.
Soon after regular service had been established over the line,
the Grand Trunk Railway set up locomotive shops in Belleville.
The city was made a divisional point in the system,and the
railway became on of its largest employers. Just how busy a
railway centre Belleville was in the hey day of the giant steam
engines, is told by a report of the Intelligencer:
"Belleville is the service centre for large numbers of 'iron
horses' and cars that roar daily across a continent. Indicative
of this important phase of railroad work is the fact that over
ninety engines were serviced here in twenty-four hours. In 1939
the Belleville branch of the railroad utilized one hundred and
twenty-three million gallons of water."
Back in the 1870's Belleville railroaders made newspaper
headlines around the country, when a Grand Trunk Railway strike
developed into a five-day riot that eventually had to be put down
by the local militia. Engineers, who were paid three dollars a
day, walked off their jobs after the railway company had
dismissed sixty-six enginemen two days before Christmas due to a
general recession. Passengers were left stranded in the middle
of a snowstorm near Cobourg. In Belleville strikers and
sympathizers, some of them armed with pistols, gathered at the
Grand Trunk station. The police were unable to cope with the
ensuing riot and a detachment of the 49th Regiment was sent to
restore order.
The mob continued to grow and overpowered the handful of
militiamen. Another forty men from the 15th Battalion called in
to help also failed to quell the riot. Finally, after three days
of yelling, stone and brick throwing, two hundred soldiers of the
Queen's Own Rifles arrived from Toronto. They advanced the
rioters with fixed bayonets. Some rioters were wounded, and the
soldiers suffered two casualties.
Railway tracks used to run through the centre of the city along
Pinnacle Street. In the summer of 1964 the last regular train
went over these tracks before they were lifted with great
ceremony, thus ending a chapter in Belleville's own Grand
Junction Railway, which ran from Belleville to Peterborough via
Stirling, Campbellford, Hastings and Keene.
In 1879 the Grand Junction Railway acquired a road built by the
Belleville and North Hastings Railway from Madoc Junction to
Eldorado, site of the first gold mine in Ontario. The first
regular train for Madoc left the Grand Junction Station below the
market on Pinnacle Street in May of 1879, thus connecting the
rich iron mines of North Hastings with the harbour of Belleville.
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