The railways of the Fraser Valley in 1914, excluding all those on the north side of the Fraser River except for CP's main line to New Westminster Junction: GN (red, the easternmost section still under construction), CNoR (purple, known in British Columbia at this time as the Canadian Northern Pacific Railway and still under construction), CP (yellow), and the British Columbia Electric Railway (green).

In the Fraser Valley the VV&E started at Port Guichon, travelling east to the current BNSF main line at Colebrook before joining the NWSR at Cloverdale, continuing east to Abbotsford and then south to the border at Huntingdon and Sumas City (connecting with other railways of the time, notably the Northern Pacific). East of Abbotsford the VV&E travelled between Sumas Mountain and Sumas Lake (now drained) to connect with the CNoR at Cannor (Sumas Landing), what is today Cannor Road near CN's Arnold siding.

At this time (1914) the VV&E and CNoR had agreed to share running rights under an agreement negotiated in 1911 (officially in 1915) between James Jerome Hill and William Mackenzie and Donald Mann: the CNoR would be allowed to use the GN from Port Kells to Brownsville over the New Westminster Bridge to reach Vancouver in exchange for rights on the CNoR from Cannor to Hope.

Since the VV&E would have running rights on the CP-owned Kettle Valley Railway (KVR) -- still not finished as of 1914 -- because it had built part of the line, from Princeton to Brookmere, and whose western terminus would be 36 miles from Cannor at Hope, the dream of GN's Kootenay-Coast railway would be realized but required 90 miles of running rights from the CP and CNoR.

From the GN station at Hope the VV&E travelled the KVR's Coquihalla Pass line to Brookmere, the divisional point of the two railways and where the VV&E first arrived in late 1914 as they pushed westward from Princeton.

The only GN train ever to run through the Coquihalla Pass was in September 1916 when GN officials, including company president Louis Hill, the son of James Jerome Hill who had passed away four months earlier, left Seattle to ride the line from Vancouver to Spokane via Princeton. With Hill's departure, however, GN had no interest in pursuing the VV&E from Vancouver to Brookmere, favouring instead GN's southerly routes to their main line in Washington State.

In 1916 the NWSR from Brownsville to Port Kells was sold to the CNoR as the terminus of their main line, with regular freight service on the new transcontinental beginning no earlier than April 1916. In May 1917 service on the rest of the NWSR, used little since 1909, was discontinued. Hazelmere to the border, no longer connected to the GN system in Blaine, was officially abandoned in 1918; Hazelmere to Port Kells in 1919.

GN ran a tri-weekly mixed train (passenger and freight) from Vancouver to Hope via Abbotsford for a few years and then in 1919 discontinued the service (the turntable at Hope was subsequently removed). Kilgard to Cannor, no longer connected to the CN main line, was officially abandoned in 1924 after helping to reclaim Sumas Lake as farmland.

Cloverdale to Abbotsford, Kilgard, and Huntingdon was abandoned in 1929. The Abbotsford-Kilgard section was subsequently sold to the Clayburn Brick Company which operated it privately to connect its brick plant at Kilgard with the CP at Abbotsford. Cloverdale to Colebrook was abandoned in 1931, although the GN station at Cloverdale closed in 1928; Colebrook to Ladner (Port Guichon) was abandoned in 1935.

The lines saw too little traffic to survive the Great Depression, road traffic, and the competition from another railway that meandered through the Fraser Valley, the British Columbia Electric Railway (BCER), which in 1910 had extended their line from New Westminster throughout the valley. Lumber was the mainstay of the GN in much of the Fraser Valley, and most of the big timbers would be gone by the 1930's.

GN was not really interested in dealing with local traffic and freight: At a meeting held at Aldergrove residents charged that trains were nearly always late, that the company had no agent at Abbotsford, and that freight was thrown off the train and no one left to care for it. They also complained that meat and furniture sometimes had to be shipped in dirty coal cars.