My favourite place to watch trains on PEI was always Royalty Junction. This morning I took a look on the PEI Government’s Aerial Photo Library to see if they had any vintage shots over the junction showing it’s trackage in it’s series of 1935 photos.
Check this one out:
Royalty Junction 1935 Aerial Photo
The first thing that caught my eye was how much more trackage there was at the Junction then. Both the Charlottetown and the Mount Stewart legs featured a lot more yard trackage. This would make a great feature on a model railway. I see the yard at the Charlottetown-end present but look at that much larger yard at the back of the wye. That’s new to me.
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This is the narrow gauge yard where CN burned and scrapped much of the PEIR’s fleet of cars. It was largely removed once all the cars were destroyed, and the third rail was removed. Who knows, there may still be narrow gauge car parts there, which were missed! It could be an interesting place to try out a metal detector.
Another temporary narrow gauge yard was built beside the Hillsborough Bridge in Charlottetown, on land that would eventually be occupied by the Irving tank farm. That yard was used to hold NG cars awaiting the end.
Another interesting feature of this photo is the ballast train heading up the Souris Subdivision.