Description of Historic Place

The Qualicum Beach Train Station is a vernacular, rustic style building with second-storey station agent’s quarters and an attached freight shed. The building is located in a municipal park, just outside the town centre. The historic place is confined to the building footprint.

Heritage Value

The Qualicum Beach Train Station is an excellent example of a community preservation project and the adaptive re-use of a historic building. Recognizing the building’s historic value and concerned about its deterioration, volunteers worked for almost a decade to raise funds for rehabilitation. Still used as a stop for passenger service on Vancouver Island, the rest of the station has been renovated for lease to community groups.

The Train Station speaks directly to the earliest settlement and development of Qualicum Beach. The arrival of rail service in 1914 was a critical turning point in Qualicum Beach's slow evolution from a sparsely-settled farming and logging district to a premiere tourist destination that featured upscale hotels, resorts and golf courses.

Representative of many Canadian Pacific Railway stations built during the period, the 1914 Qualicum Beach Train Station is an excellent example of a vernacular, rustic style building. It’s rambling form, picturesque roofline and overall cottage character represents the type of architecture favoured in Qualicum Beach at the time. The building’s location in a large municipal park reinforces its rustic ambience.

Source: Town of Qualicum Beach, Corporate Administration

Character-Defining Elements

The character-defining elements of the Qualicum Beach Train Station include:
- those elements that express the building’s rustic-vernacular architecture, including its irregular massing, wood-shingled, bellcast hipped roof, clapboard and shingle siding, eave brackets, dormers, variation in pitch between the station and freight shed roofs, twin brick chimneys and the combination of mullioned single-hung, fixed and casement windows
- those elements that represent the building’s functional role as a transportation hub, including it’s location adjacent to the railway track and the attached freight shed
- the building’s location in a municipal park