When railways connected small communities all over the region, the centre of train activity was the little village of McAdam, N.B.
Virgil Reagon started a job on the railway in the 1940s.
“We'd come up here and do the Montreal and the Boston,” Reagon says. “When the troop trains started, that was a really busy job. We'd work for days and nights and never get a bit of sleep."
It was a time when McAdam was located on the main rail lines that connected Saint John with Boston and with Montreal, and Montreal with the town of St. Andrews.
There was never a time that a train wasn't passing through the village.
"You start off with 16 passenger trains a day,” says railway museum historian Elsie Carroll. “Then you're talking 30 or 40 freight trains a day, and every train stopped and was serviced here. They took on their fuel and whatever they happened to be using at the time."
As you might expect, the railway was the biggest employer in McAdam for many decades.
“When the whistle blew … you didn't want to get in the way,” says retired railway worker Alfred Lord. “You'd be trampled by the people heading home for supper. I mean, there was a lot of men."
Men like Bud McDade, who worked everywhere at the station.
"I worked over in the shops, I worked in the roundhouse, I worked in the ash pit,” he says. “You could go to work every day and they'd send you someplace different."
Because all rail lines seemed to converge on McAdam, hundreds of people got steady work and a regular pay cheque.
"When I started it was 25 cents an hour. That was doing labour in the labour gang," says Reagon.
The train station was built in 1900 for $30,000. These days, that sum wouldn't come close to covering upkeep on the building.
The local restoration committee is receiving assistance from the federal and provincial governments to help maintain this building, as the symbol of an era when railways played a much bigger role in the Maritimes.
With files from CTV Atlantic’s Mike Cameron.
