Description of Historic Place

The Canadian Northern (C.No.R) Station Building is a one and one-half storey wooden railway station, built in 1912, located on Railway Avenue in the town of Big Valley. The station is adjacent to the rail line, which is still in use but not a part of the designated area.

The Roundhouse complex is an extensive collection of concrete ruins, pits and foundations remaining from the switching yards and facilities designed for servicing steam locomotives. These include the remnants of an ash pit, a mechanical coaling plant, sand house, a stores building, a water tank, a turntable, and a roundhouse with annexes and a 5-stall extension. The site occupies approximately 2.379 hectares of land.

Heritage Value

The historical significance of the Canadian Northern (C.No.R) Station Building and Roundhouse Site Complex at Big Valley lies in its direct association with Alberta's great railway boom between 1909-1920. On the Alberta Midland line of the Canadian Northern Railway, it housed the offices of a major divisional point, conducted traffic between Drumheller and Vegreville, and oversaw operations of the line west to Rocky Mountain House. The station is also an excellent example of standard railway architecture and is the least altered of the four surviving stations of this kind in Alberta.

The creation of branch lines like the Alberta Midland reflected an unprecedented degree of provincial - rather than federal - investment in railway construction after 1909, and the energy of economic expansion in the years before World War One. The line was intended to provide passenger service and open up lands for farming in the period of settlement, and to tap the rich coal deposits around Drumheller. A townsite was surveyed off the rail line in 1910, the stationhouse built in 1912, and the roundhouse complex between 1912 -18. But the 1922 merger of Canadian Northern Railway with Grand Trunk lines, to create the Canadian National Railway, rendered the line redundant.

The station and site components are also significant as examples of the standard architectural design created for the C.N.R.'s western operations by architect Ralph Benjamin Pratt. It is the only known complex of this nature remaining in the province and constitutes a landmark for the region.

Source: Alberta Culture and Community Spirit, Historic Resources Management Branch (File: Des. 2175)

Character-Defining Elements

Elements of the Canadian Northern Railway's (C.No.R) Standard Second Class Station (Plan #100-39) design, including:
- form, scale and massing;
- wood frame structure with exterior finished materials and fenestration pattern, including a bay window centrally located on the trackside;
- cedar roof shingles, decorative wood ridge finials and walls;
- high hipped roof on a one and one-half storey section, broken by a large gable dormer on the front and back slopes; secondary gable roofs over the one-storey baggage / freight rooms and waiting rooms, forming a shingled awning supported by large wood brackets with deep overhang;
- brick chimney on the roof;
- exterior platform;
- tracks beside platform;
- period landscape features associated with the station building such as trees and lawn;
- interior wood paneling and details (wainscoting) and wood strip flooring;
- interior floor layout.

Character-defining elements of the Roundhouse complex include:
- form, scale and massing of the roundhouse structural ruins;
- concrete retaining walls, depressed track bed, and concrete floor slab of the ash pit;
- remains of the last sand house under mounds of sand;
- concrete basement and stairs of stores building;
- water tank supply pipe and footings of the foundation;
- turntable: concrete circular wall, circular pit, cinder paving, catch basin grating;
- two excavated locomotive pits;
- concrete floor slab in the boiler room, remnants of wood plank flooring in the machine shop;
- anchor bolts on concrete walls of Roundhouse
- viewscape: including remains of pump houses, reservoir and dam to the east.