The Case of Metro Vancouver’s Lost Electric Railway

Lisa Codd is hunting for signs of a skeleton.

Stretching about 23 kilometres and cutting through three modern cities, it was a record-breaking specimen before its death in 1953.

Though development has transformed this once agricultural and industrial part of Burnaby’s south, it’s not long before Codd finds the evidence. Taking the SkyTrain to the Royal Oak Station, she immediately spots a rugged path where a much older rapid transit system once ran: the interurban.

Considering that it’s been seven decades since this electric railway system linked the region, it’s amazing how many remnants are in plain sight.

Cutting through Royal Oak Avenue is a pair of steel tracks. Long strips of old wood are sitting to the side of the interurban’s old path. It’s likely they were part of the train system — just a few steps away, Codd finds a rail spike among the rocks.

“There’s a very deliberate ‘turning our back on’ this history,” says Codd, a heritage planner for the City of Burnaby.

It’s a strange thing, because this corridor is extremely well used.

There’s the SkyTrain, developed in time for Expo 86, which runs along the old interurban route. There’s the BC Parkway, a walking and cycling trail, also developed in the ’80s, which runs alongside the SkyTrain’s tracks.

And yet the interurban, which is adjacent to all of this, looks like it has been forgotten.

Parts of the corridor look like they were obviously once home to a train, yet are empty and grown over. And here and there are leftover tracks, stretching across the sidewalks and main roads, ditches and dirt paths.

On this Friday morning, I’m tagging along with Codd, who has her smartphone and a stack of maps in hand to try to document the scattered skeleton of the interurban.

The BC Parkway spans three cities. The City of Burnaby is in the process of enhancing a portion of it from Boundary to Royal Oak, which passes destinations like Central Park, Metrotown and the Bonsor community centres.

The project is called Parkway Alive, and the goodies being considered include a dog park, a performance space, a public market space, garden rooms, illuminated bike paths and recreation like basketball and pickleball courts. The city has already begun some temporary animation of the parkway, having put out picnic and ping-pong tables.

Once Codd collects her evidence, she hopes the parkway project might also be able to pay homage in some way to the electric system that transformed the region.

Riding the electric rails

The first streetcar hit Vancouver in 1890.

Streetcar expert Henry Ewert, the author of four books on the subject, says it took some time for locals to get used to the idea of such technology. The cars drew electricity from trolley poles via overhead wires. At first, people worried about being electrocuted.

But once they embraced the convenience, the interurban lines grew more extensive than the SkyTrains and Canada Lines of today, stretching south to Steveston in Richmond and east into the Fraser Valley with a terminus in Chilliwack.

It was, in fact, the longest network of interurban lines in Canada. Anyone could catch a ride to visit the department stores of downtown Vancouver or the public market in New Westminster.

The interurbans guided the growth of the region, seeding development and settlement along the tracks.

The transportation heritage here goes back even further. The route of the streetcar, adjacent to Kingsway, follows a corridor once travelled by various Salish peoples.

“It just so happened that [Robert] Burnaby’s engineering crew that he was out with just happened to follow the First Nations guides they were with,” the city’s Indigenous relations manager, Fancy C. Poitras, once told the Burnaby Beacon, “and that’s how we ended up with these major roadways being claimed by colonial governments.”

In the 1950s, the BC Electric Railway Co. shut down its lines one by one in favour of buses as part of its “Rails-to-Rubber” program. It was a similar story in cities across North America, accelerated by the rise of the car.

The Vancouver-to-New Westminster line that Codd is tracing in Burnaby, known as the Central Park Line, ran its last service in 1953.

The company was absorbed into BC Hydro, which is why the utility company owns the land today. TransLink is a licence holder to the land.

Here are some of the traces of the old interurban Codd encountered on her route from Royal Oak Station towards Boundary Road.

Once you start looking, thanks to a guide like Codd, you notice how the built landscape in this part of Burnaby still speaks to the presence of an interurban rail line.

You can see the shape of triangular buildings along the route, designed to let the interurban glide by. You can see it in the industrial businesses, closely fronting the former path of the tracks for easy deliveries. “Some of them even had their own spurs,” says Codd.

The interurban’s remnants are more than just an old skeleton — it’s still a strong backbone.

“The exciting thing about the project is that it’s not just ‘Here’s a remnant of something that used to be here,’” says Codd. “To me, the interurban is not dead because the impact it had on the community is still with us.”