The Legend of the Lost Locomotive

Where is that train buried?
Published Sept. 13, 2003
By Dan Hilborn, Burnaby Now assistant editor


It is one of the most fascinating tales of Burnaby's past. Told and retold for almost 100 years, the story of the sunken engine has always seemed pretty straightforward.

The crew of a train sent to deliver a load of ballast to shore up the new railway lines built over the peat bog around Burnaby Lake had stopped for lunch on a fateful summer day at the turn of the last century.

The men apparently walked several miles for an extended lunch, and when they came back, the engine was gone - sunk into the deep muck.

But local amateur historian and former Burnaby parks commissioner Tony Fabian disagrees with the most common version of the tale. And after searching for old newspaper stories and talking to some of the original settlers who lived in the area when the train disappeared, Fabian has come up with his own version of what may have happened.

Fabian doesn't believe the train crew was stopping for lunch. Why would they walk two miles to a hotel on the north side of Still Creek, as alleged in one early version of the story, when it would have been a whole lot easier to have simply stopped on firmer ground, he asks?

Fabian's theory is based on the kind of neighbourhood that developed in central Burnaby at the turn of the century when the logging crews were just finishing the job of clear cutting the central valley, and as the first squatters were moving onto the newly opened farmland.

On a slightly rainy April afternoon, the 69-year-old Fabian brought out his walking stick and headed down to exact spot where the train is believed to have sunk - about 100 metres from the intersection of Roy Avenue and Douglas Road where Beecher Creek crosses the rail line at the rear of what is today a parking lot.

"The newspapers say that the guys went to up that hill to a hotel for lunch, but I don't believe it," Fabian said, as he pointed his walking stick north towards the Lougheed Highway. "The nearest hotel would be almost two miles from here. Why would they walk that far?

"We know there were little squatter shacks all around the hills here. And I figure there would have been a little entertainment there," he says with a twinkle in his eye.

Fabian may have some inside knowledge on the true story. He's lived in the neighbourhood for 47 years and was an acquaintance with one of the area's original residents - Phil Haquill, a squatter who was the last farmer in the city to plough his land with horses.

In their many meetings as young men, Fabian learned that there was at least one 'speakeasy' - an illegal drinking establishment - in the neighbourhood where the crew stopped the train. The old Royal Oak Hotel was infamous in its day, primarily because it also was home to a brothel.

Whether the brothel was the actual reason for the sunken train or not, nobody left alive today really knows for certain. But Fabian notes with suspicion that all of the old reports of the sunken train gloss over this pertinent fact.

For instance, the Columbian newspaper story that sparked his interest in the tale features a lengthy interview with Nap Peltier, the last surviving crew member of the missing train.

In the interview, conducted in 1959, Peltier tells reporter Bill Hastings that the train was lost before railway line was complete.

"One day when we got there it was close to noon so we did not dump the gravel and went to lunch. There was a hotel nearby and this particular day we spent more time over lunch than we should have. When we got back the train was not there. All we saw were the tracks going down into the muddy water, with bubbles coming up. ... There was trouble, oh, yes, there was a lot of trouble."

Could Peltier's version have glossed over the juicy bits of the tale? Burnaby historian Jim Wolf said Fabian's bawdy house theory fits perfectly with some new information he's uncovered since he last wrote about the story in Pixie McGeachie's beautifully crafted coffee table book Burnaby: A Proud Century.

"It's true," Wolf says emphatically. "They walked up to the Royal Oak Hotel, where the Safeway is today. Back then it was a notorious brothel."

Wolf's current understanding of the facts also casts doubt on some of the other less titillating aspects of the older version of the tale.

The ballast train may not have sunk in 1906 when the tracks were first built, but may in fact have gone down in 1912, when a massive sinkhole appeared on the boggy railway line and shut down passenger service for several months.

Wolf, an assistant planner at city hall, has found photographs which show an old steam engine train travelling over a built section of railway bed around the Still Creek bog, where a crew of workmen appear to be filling in a massive sinkhole.

The picture, which shows the creek passing over a small trestle, matches the geography of the Beecher Creek site where farmer Haquill alleges the train went down.

Fabian, however, believes there are two sunken trains. The first, which was completely lost in 1906 during the bawdy house incident, and a second train, which lost only a few coal cars when it was swallowed by a sinkhole in 1912.

"The coal train sunk just east of Holdom," says Fabian, who has spent most of his life exploring Burnaby Lake. "You can still find lots of coal lying around there. At least two cars sank.

"But the first train was an old engine pulling two loads of ballast, and it went down because they built the railway too cheap and fast," he says.

The trainmen, old farmer and hotel employees have all since died, and the neighbourhood has undergone dramatic change. Haquill's farm is now the City of Burnaby recycling depot, and city hall has given the name Sunken Engine Creek to a small waterway not far from where the incident actually happened.

Wolf believes that nobody will ever learn for sure what truly happened with the sunken steam engine, and that's just fine for him.

"That's the wonderful thing about the bog," he said. "Because there is no evidence, we really don't know what happened. Is it true? I'm not sure we want to find out."

For Fabian, the important thing is to remind people today what this city was like back in the days when the railway ruled the country and Burnaby was a rather unexpected stop along the line.

"I think it's important for people to remember," Fabian said. "This is the way stories go. First it's a story, then it's a myth, and then, if nobody remembers, it gets forgotten."

And Fabian wants to make sure that the legend of the lost locomotive of Burnaby Lake does not get lost itself.