According to the book The Great Northern Railway: A History, the New Westminster Southern Railway had 23.51 miles of trackage in 1890 and another 0.59 miles in 1891, totaling 24.1 miles. With this number, I have pieced together the following mileposts based mainly on an 1891 time table and an 1897 map of Surrey Municipality by the NWSR's former chief engineer, Albert J. Hill, who carried out the original location surveys. (A.J. Hill's previous work included a CPR contract from Yale to Sumas between 1880 and 1882, then went on to Port Moody where he finished his government services with the railway in 1884. He was engineer for the Municipality of Surrey among other ventures in his private practice.) Also used for the mileposts were various CNoR and CNR time tables, CN's Greater Vancouver Terminal Operating Manual, and a CN document titled Road Crossing Particulars: Yale Subdivision.

The 1891 time table listed Blaine as mile zero, so I calculated the distance from the Boundary to Hazelmere and then worked north from that point. What is presented here reflects the NWSR's early mileposts, along with others that would follow when the CNoR (soon CN) acquired the line from Port Kells Jct. to the east side of the Fraser River Bridge.

If the numbers are correct, the Brownsville station board would have been on the west side of the former Musqueam and Langley Indian Reserve, beside today's Fraser River Bridge, the entrance to a parcel of land called South Westminster (once part of New Westminster).

The names added to the stylized 1897 map were culled from post office, school, and voters list records, reflecting the date of the map. Clover Valley is shown on the land owned by the first postmaster, D. McKenzie, before the railway came. The 1898 voters list shows Leeds' and Hjorth Landings, reflecting the sternwheeler stops along Parsons Channel of the Fraser River.

I have added the logging ditch used by the Royal City Planing Mills Co. (RCPM Co.) to float timber down to the Nicomekl River. The ditch, with four locks, built in the 1880's by ex-CPR Chinese labour, was used to haul the "Curly" locomotive to the first railway in Surrey, the 4-mile Royal City Railroad which ran west of the ditch. It was used for three years then timber was hauled a shorter route via the completed NWSR to the Port Kells log dump, where it was boomed to the Royal City mill at New Westminster (and perhaps later to the company mill at Liverpool). The contour of the ditch is that of today, evidently unchanged over the years unlike the Nicomekl.

I have also added the spur to the RCPM Co. log dump along the Fraser River at Port Kells, whose contour I am uncertain. Evidently it exited Harvie Road at 92nd Ave. then crossed 94th Ave. and 192nd St. on its way to the Fraser. Also not shown on the original map is the trackage to Blaine, 0.4 miles from the boundary.

Post offices present in 1897, listed in chronological order: Mud Bay (1881), Clover Valley (1883), Hall's Prairie (1883), Elgin (1885), Surrey Centre (1887), Clayton (1889), Brownsville (1891), Port Kells (1891), Nicomekl (1892), Cloverdale (1892), Hazelmere (1893), and Tynehead (1893). In 1890 a post office opened at Sunnyside but closed after the NWSR was built.

Schools present in 1897: Clover Valley (1882), Mud Bay (1883), Hall's Prairie (1885), Kensington (1887), Anniedale (1890), Clayton (1890), Port Kells (1890; located on the Langley side of the border), Tynehead (1890; called Serpentine as was the general area), Brownsville (1891), Surrey Centre (1891), and East Kensington (1895 or 1898). A place called Douglas had a school starting in 1895, but I am not sure if this was the same as Douglas H.M. Customs at the international boundary. Schools to come in the following years: Newton Road (1901), Barnston Island (1903), Scott Road (1905), and Johnston Road (1906), reflecting the burgeoning communities not named on the map. Hotels were at Elgin, Douglas, Cloverdale, Liverpool, and South Westminster -- the area generally known as Brownsville.

Elgin was the original customs point, established in 1880 where the Semiahmoo Road crossed the Nicomekl River, which was navigable to Hall's Prairie Road. Customs would be moved to Douglas a few months after the NWSR officially opened early in 1891, with the same customs officer, Harry D. Chantrell. Before the railway came a twice weekly stagecoach traveled the Semiahmoo Road from Brownsville to Blaine via Elgin and St. Leonard's, a hotel on the Canadian side of the boundary. Those across the Fraser River at New Westminster had to take a ferry, initiated in 1884, to reach Brownsville and the stage south.

It appears that the ferry dock at Brownsville, the one built for the railway, was located at the end of Scott Road instead of Yale Road, which is where I have placed it on the map. I had always assumed it was at Yale Road.

The first Great Northern passenger train from Seattle arrived at Brownsville on November 27, 1891, shortly after the GN's Seattle & Montana Railway was completed along Puget Sound, which connected with the Fairhaven & Southern Railroad and thence the NWSR -- finishing phase one of James J. Hill's unified Pacific Coast Line well before his main line was completed to Everett in 1893. A newly built interurban, the Westminster & Vancouver Tramway (later part of the BCER) was a 10-minute ferry ride away from Brownsville, linking the Royal City with Vancouver through the wilds of Burnaby.

The 1898 voters list shows a number of people residing in Royal City Camps, those of the Royal City Planing Mills. Listed are other logging camps, which were better equipped and more populous than many established communities. Two RCPM Co. camps were noted on the original map, west of Hazelmere.

Railway employees on the voters list: George Gairns of Liverpool (railway employer); Robert Harvie of Royal City Camp (locomotive engineer), John Shortreed of Royal City Camp (locomotive fireman), William V. Frampton of Cloverdale (section foreman), and Daniel Sullivan of Cloverdale (railway employee).

The 1897 map shows the land around Liverpool belonging to "McNair et al" which was David McNair of the RCPM Co., who built a mill here along the Fraser -- at today's CN mile 117.1 -- soon after 1894 when the company's New Westminster mill was destroyed by fire (later rebuilt). To the east, still part of Liverpool, was a parcel owned by "A.E. Rand et al", a prominent New Westminster real estate agent who also had a parcel at Bon Accord, a small farming and fishing community (whose hatchery, built in the 1880's, was still in operation).

East of Liverpool was a parcel owned by T.J. Trapp, a prominent New Westminster merchant and Secretary of the NWSR. The brick yard along Parsons Channel and other lots at Port Kells, and those at the railway's terminus in South Westminster, were owned by A.J. McColl, a New Westminster barrister and another principal of the NWSR. Other principals, members of the New Westminster Board of Trade, included Judge W. Norman Bole, Henry Hoy (a contractor), Gordon Edward Corbould (a barrister), Alexander Ewen (noted salmon canner), and John Hendry, president of the B.C. Mills, Timber & Trading Company (RCPM Co.), the Great Northern Railway's front man in British Columbia.

In 1891 50-car sidings were at Cloverdale, Port Kells and Liverpool, where there was a wye and a dock linking the GNR via rail barge to Vancouver's Burrard Inlet and later to Sidney on Vancouver Island. Liverpool, a townsite borne of the railway, also was the site of a RCPM Co. mill and a cannery near the current junction at Gyproc. At Port Kells there was a spur to the RCPM Co. log dump along the Fraser River.

In 1903 the Victoria Terminal Railway & Ferry Co. was completed from Cloverdale to Port Guichon, linked by ferry to Sidney on Vancouver Island where the Victoria & Sidney Railway Co. connected the province's capital city, Victoria. Thus traffic on the NWSR from Cloverdale to Liverpool increased, albeit briefly, with two daily trains to and from Victoria. In 1903 the VTR&F would have time table stations in Surrey Municipality at Alluvia and Surrey (at Coast Meridian Road). Time table stations listed in June 1903: Victoria (mile 0), Hillside Ave. (1), Royal Oak (6), Elk Lake (9), Keating (11), Saanichton (13), Sidney (17), Port Guichon (65), Challuckthan (66), Inverholme [Inverholm] (68), Bayside (73), Alluvium [Alluvia] (77), Surrey (81), Cloverdale (82), Port Kells (87), Bon Accord (94), Liverpool (97), and Brownsville (99).

Bayside was just across the Surrey border, named after the Delta farm of John Oliver who would later become premier of British Columbia. It was renamed Oliver then Colebrook in 1909 with a station built on the Surrey side of the border. In 1903 the New Westminster Bridge was under construction, as was the GNR line from New Westminster to Vancouver, so passengers still had to ferry from Brownsville to New Westminster and take the electric tramway -- by 1897 part of the BCER -- to Vancouver.

9.4 miles of the original NWSR still has track: 8.3 miles in the Yale Sub and 1.1 miles in the Brownsville Industrial Line (excluding the track buried beneath the asphalt of Lindall Cedar Homes).

Canadian Northern shops, Port Mann (ca. 1913)

The photo above -- at future CNoR mile 116.1 to 115.9 -- was taken over a mile west of the Bon Accord flagstop, from the former property of T.J. Trapp. In 1913 the GNR was still running scheduled trains through here while construction of the CNoR facilities went on. East of here was the property owned by the Reverend Thomas Haddon who bought in 1893 after the NWSR was built. In 1912 he sold out to the CNoR, for part of the Port Mann townsite, and built a fine home in the uplands. It exists today as one of the few surviving structures built during the initial frenzy of the townsite, which stretched far beyond river level.

Port Mann Hotel at future CNoR mile 114.4 (1913)

Thornton Yard's facilities and holding yards begin at the Flanagan Street Xing at mile 116.8 and extend to the Vancouver Intermodal Terminal fence at mile 110.4, near the former CNoR Tynehead time table station at the junction of Hjorth Road (104th Avenue) and Clover Valley Road (176th Street). Thornton is 6.4 miles long, comprised of three main holding yards. BNSF motive power coming into the yard travel no further than mile 114.1, east of the Port Mann Bridge.