#Railway Station McAdam

[atlanticcanada]

Final book in Abigail Massey series launches at McAdam Railway Station

Mary O'Keefe is releasing the final book in the Abigail Massey series on Sunday. The series tells the story of a woman who works as a chambermaid at the McAdam Railway Station Hotel in the 1940s.

from CBC | New Brunswick News https://ift.tt/X6YWgPy

[furryalligator]

(via Architecture | Canada Stamp Series)

[kandsgoeast]

June 25, 2020

McAdam Railway Station- just beautiful!

Closed temporarily because of COVID but we had a good look in the windows.

[aryburn-trains]

Built by EMD in 1949 (Serial Number 8681, Class DPA-22a) CPR 1801 sits on one of the platforms at Windsor Station in Montreal in the late 60s, following its Maritimes assignment from Montreal to St. John NB via Maine as as CPR 41/42 "The Atlantic Limited", crossing into the US at Megantic Que and emerging back into Canada at McAdam NB

CPR always operated "The Atlantic" at minimal levels with only a single E8 locomotive, baggage car, coach, diner and sleeping car. Passengers for Halifax were required to use a ferry, thentransfer to the Dominion Atlantic Railway (DAR).

[ceridwyn2]

A friend and I went out to McAdam Railway Station & Museum in McAdam, NB for Railway Pie day (Sundays 1-4 in the summer). #mcadamrailwaystation #blackandwhitephotography #jj_blackwhite #sunnyday #outfitoftheday #mobilephotography (at McAdam station)

[briansolomonauthor]

BRNO, Czech Republic.

In April 2005, I visited the Czech city of Brno with Denis McCabe and the late Norman McAdams.

Working with a Nikon N90S with f.8 180mm Nikkor lens, I exposed this Fujichrome Sensia II (ISO 100) slide of a tram as it approached the stop near the main railway station.

Tracking the Light Posts Daily!

Subscribe using the page toward the bottom of this post.

[marilynngmesalo]

New Brunswick village inundated with calls after offering land for a loonie

New Brunswick village inundated with calls after offering land for a loonie New Brunswick village inundated with calls after offering land for a loonie https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

MCADAM, N.B. — The mayor of a small New Brunswick village says the community has been inundated with calls and emails after it offered to sell plots of land for less than the price of a cup of coffee.

Ken Stannix said McAdam, N.B. — population 1,225 — has seen a small population boost in recent years, but he hopes that selling empty plots of land for $1 each will further bolster the numbers.

The town announced in November that it would offer the deal on 16 plots of land, and since then, more than 600 interested buyers have contacted them from across the country, and even from faraway places like India and Pakistan.

“We didn’t really anticipate that,” said Stannix. “We thought there would be some interest in it and we would probably attract some, but we weren’t ready for the 600-plus people who called and sent emails.”

McAdam, about an hour’s drive southwest of Fredericton, has three major draws, he said: industry, tourism and retirement. It’s home to two manufacturing plants, a historic railway station that attracts thousands of visitors each year, a lakeside campground, local businesses and services for seniors.

The idea to sell the plots of land has been in the works for about two years. The town formed a community action group to address the village’s population, which had been in decline for decades following the collapse of their rail industry.

Since then, the village has sold 62 houses, heralding in a modest population bump and increased interest in McAdam.

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“Suddenly, we had people coming to us and saying, ‘Is there any land available? We’d like to build, but we can’t find any lots,”‘ said Stannix.

He said the town approached the provincial government and offered to buy the 16 plots of land, which range in size from 665 to 1,086 square metres.

While each plot is valued between $5,000 and $7,500, Stannix said the village paid “substantially less” for the land, with the province’s understanding that they had a plan to increase the community’s population.

He said the pool of applicants has been narrowed down to 86 people — 11 of whom have already been selected as suitable buyers, mostly comprising of young retirees and families.

Stannix said the close-knit town is focused on choosing buyers who would like to build houses and spend their lives in the village instead of developers looking to build properties and sell them.

“We had people that called and said, ‘I want to take all 16 lots and I’ll build houses on them,’ and that really wasn’t what we were looking for,” he said.

“What we wanted to do is have people take a look at the village: know where they were buying the lots, where they were planning to move, because their success is our success.”

Because of the high demand, he said applications have closed.

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This isn’t the first time a town has drastically reduced the cost of land to attract new residents. In 2017, the small town of Smooth Rock Falls, Ont., offered to reimburse 90 per cent of the cost of the land if people built on it within two years — reducing the land cost to as little as $500 in some cases.

As of November, 24 new families chose to buy pre-existing homes in the community after learning about the offer.

Stannix said the ultimate goal is to increase McAdam’s population by at least a thousand.

“Back in the heyday of McAdam, when it was a railroad town, and we had lots of people working with the railroad here, we probably had a population of about 2,700 to about 3,000,” he said. “And many people here thought that that population size was the goal to shoot for.”

He said he’s reached out to companies to set up shop in the community to increase services for their new residents.

The land promotion is also attracting interest in the sale of pre-existing homes, said Stannix. As an example, he pointed to a conversation he had with a retirement-age man in Ontario who was initially interested buying a plot of land, but instead considered selling his million-dollar home, buying a house in the village, and retiring on what he could sell his house for.

“He said, ‘I think, if you don’t mind, I’ll just buy a house there,’ and I said, “oh my heavens, I don’t mind if you buy a house! We’re just happy to have you come down,'” said Stannix.

“The biggest thing is these people that come, they have energy and they have ideas. And that helps the community grow.”

  Click for update news Bangla news http://bit.ly/2St99oh world news

[jamesgeiiger]

The small towns that refuse to die: Schemes to woo new blood about more than just staying alive

Jay Patel decided about four years ago he wanted to buy a motel. He was living in Brampton, Ont., and working as a machine operator in a warehouse, a job he had done in a few different places since immigrating to Canada from India in 2000. The work afforded Patel and his wife, Sudha, enough money to buy a home and raise a child, but it failed to provide the 50-something-year-old with what he really wanted: his own business and the sense, sink or swim, that he was in charge of his fate.

This past August, Patel made his move. He found a place, the aptly named Moose Motel in Smooth Rock Falls, Ont., a former paper mill town about 800 kilometres north of Brampton, and bought it from its previous owner, Naynesh Patel (no relation).

Naynesh Patel was likewise a dreamer from India and had owned the Moose for a year before being beset with health challenges hastening the motel’s sale, though he vows to return to the town upon his recovery to open a sandwich shop, because, as he said on a late November afternoon, his wife and three young kids love the place and “the community has done everything possible to make them feel welcome.”

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The two Patel families’ willingness to take a chance on a town that was left for dead in 2006 after forestry giant Tembec Inc. shuttered the local mill, are exactly the kind of adventurous souls Smooth Rock Falls hoped to attract when it rebranded itself as the “near north, near perfect” Canadian town a year ago.

“We used to be a reactive town council,” said Michel Arseneault, the three-term mayor and a third-generation town resident. “Now we are proactive. We finally feel like we are in control of our destiny.”

A place some thought didn’t have a future is selling lots next to the golf course for $500 a pop, offering business owners and newcomers major tax breaks to move in, guaranteeing loans on new residential and non-residential construction projects and declaring to the world, or so it is hoped, that Smooth Rock Falls, population 1,400, isn’t teetering on the brink, but on its way back.

The Moose Motel in Smooth Rock Falls, Ont.

However admirable, a small town’s fight for survival obscures a much larger 21st century truth: the overwhelming majority of us live and work in cities, and so saving a Smooth Rock Falls, or any of the hundreds of other seen-better-days places that dot the map, arguably only makes fiscal sense for the people stuck living there.

But there is another side to that argument and a belief, among some, that our rural communities aren’t just relics from the past, but islands of potential growth.

“We are faced with this dilemma in Canada, we don’t have a command economy, we are not like Russia — where we can close down a city — so we let these communities wither, and sometimes they die and sometimes they fight back,” said Ken Coates, Canada Research Chair in Regional Innovation at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. “They refuse to give up, and they push and they push, and they come up with ideas — and the (discounted) housing one is really interesting.”

Coates, a small town kid from the Yukon at heart, believes that depending on location and access to amenities such as health care, small towns can be a significant part of the future.

One avenue of growth is the greying population. A newly retired baby boomer with a mortgage-free house, love of the outdoors, aversion to traffic and belief in getting to know the neighbours can swap that home for one in Smooth Rock Falls that costs $70,000, give or take.

“People can move to these places and live like royalty,” Coates said.

Small towns can also work for seniors on a fixed-income crunch who might need affordable care. And rather than being places young people flee in favour of major urban centres, they can work as access points to the global economy.

A generation ago, if you were a company manufacturing, say, shoes, the idea was to gain as much market share as possible by selling gazillions of shoes. Now, the internet makes the world a metaphorical shoe store and serves as the ultimate marketing tool: the independent cobbler, milliner, tailor, professional writer, you-name-it-craftsperson with a custom product to sell can live somewhere affordable and still have access to their consumers/audience.

“I see a huge opportunity for craft-based industries in these towns,” Coates said, adding that a lot of former one-industry towns are located near a major power source.

For example, Smooth Rock Falls is home to a hydroelectric generating station. Cheap electricity, in the electricity-intensive digitized economy, can be directed toward housing a warehouse full of internet servers.

A welcome sign in Smooth Rock Falls, Ont.

“We don’t need the migrations of hundreds of thousands of people to these towns,” Coates said. “Thirty people can turn a community from being at risk to being viable.”

On a macro-scale, rural communities matter economically, despite what city folk might think.

A 2018 Federation of Canadian Municipalities report — Rural challenges, national opportunity — counted more than four million Canadians working in rural areas/small towns, and they contribute 27 per cent of the national GDP.

The fastest-growing sector in rural economies is health care, while their biggest need is an injection of youth. Boomers, and their bank accounts, are great, but a town needs young people to be truly sustainable.

“It’s not so much the money, it’s the injection of energy into a place,” said Ken Stannix, mayor of McAdam, N.B., which, like Smooth Rock Falls, has put itself up for sale.

The town, population 1,250, has been gripped by a land rush in recent days, triggered by the village council’s announcement that it was selling 16 residential building lots — for a buck a piece — on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Stannix, a retired Canadian air force veteran, spent the first week of December returning some of the 500-plus phone calls the village office has received from Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, parts in between and parts as far away as India.

“I am not really sure why we chose a dollar,” he said, but that decision has certainly attracted attention.

For instance, “Grace and Wayne,” prospective buyers from Winnipeg, appeared in McAdam on a Monday morning. The mayor gave them a personal tour of the village with the historic railway station near the Maine/New Brunswick border, chatting with them as they went. The couple, in their late 50s, expressed interest in opening a business and of starting a new chapter in their lives.

The historic railway station in McAdam, N.B.

McAdam, by all accounts, has its attractions for those who want to escape the hurly-burly of a big city. Likewise, Smooth Rock Falls has always been a gateway to some of the most pristine wilderness in northern Ontario, but that wasn’t enough when the Tembec mill shut down 12 years ago.

“We all thought we had jobs for life and that our kids would, too,” said Mayor Arseneault, who was a millwright and 53 years old when the mill closed. “We ended up in a situation where all our young people had to leave to find work elsewhere. It devastated our local schools, our sports facilities — no kids, less hockey teams — our home prices bottomed out. It was terrible.”

The people that stayed were still good people. There were no traffic jams, houses were cheap and wait times at the local hospital negligible. In the year since the town’s rebranding effort was launched, 24 families, representing a mix of ages, have bought in, including the Patels from Brampton. Six commercial-zoned properties have also been sold by the town, though the mayor can’t say, just yet, what the new owners are planning to build.

Back at the Moose Motel, Jay Patel was tending to six guests a few weeks before Christmas. He and his wife have hired a local person to help with the cleaning, and the couple has big plans for the spring to continue the work Naynesh Patel started: painting, renovating and revitalizing the 30-room place on the Trans-Canada Highway with the moose statue out front.

“We are happy here,” Patel said. “We are not worried about the winter. We had winter in Brampton, too.”

Financial Post

• Email: joconnor@nationalpost.com | Twitter: oconnorwrites

The small towns that refuse to die: Schemes to woo new blood about more than just staying alive published first on https://worldwideinvestforum.tumblr.com/

[anenglishmaninontario]

Off the Beaten Track

Off the Beaten Track

I caught sight of the McAdam Railway Stationin the province tourist guide and it looked kind of interesting. It’s grand old building in the middle of a small town near the US border where trains would bring in imports from the US and connecting New Brunswick to the Canadian Pacific Railway. The site served as a rail-yard, hotel, restaurant and customs point. The thing which really draws me in,…

[noisenb]

from @tanyagrealey — “All Aboard The Christmas Express”🎄🎁🎅 Christmas Season at the McAdam railway station. Beautiful!!! Dec 18,2018 . . . #christmasmagic #trainstation #railway #christmaslights #christmas #tistheseason #noiseNB #tourismnb #tourismfredericton #ExploreNB #destinationnb #clickpro #clickmagazine #tgol_lowlight #thegalleryoflight #naturallightphotography #naturallight #landscapephtography #landscapecaptur #landscapehunter #photoEdCollab #womanphotographer #nbphotography #nbproud #exploretheeastcoast #atlanticcanada https://ift.tt/2Bs0rvW

[atlanticcanada]

Final book in Abigail Massey series launches at McAdam Railway Station

Mary O'Keefe is releasing the final book in the Abigail Massey series on Sunday. The series tells the story of a woman who works as a chambermaid at the McAdam Railway Station Hotel in the 1940s.

from CBC | New Brunswick News https://ift.tt/dtjSqfm

[atlanticcanada]

New Brunswick village inundated with calls after offering land for a loonie

MCADAM, N.B. -- The mayor of a small New Brunswick village says the community has been inundated with calls and emails after it offered to sell plots of land for less than the price of a cup of coffee.

Ken Stannix says McAdam, N.B. -- population 1,225 -- has seen a small population boost in recent years, but he hopes that selling empty plots of land for $1 each will further bolster the numbers.

The town announced in November that it would offer the deal on 16 plots of land, and since then, more than 600 interested buyers have contacted them.

Stannix says the town is focused on attracting buyers who would like to build houses and spend their lives in the village instead of developers looking to build properties and sell them.

He says the pool of applicants has been narrowed down to 86 people -- 11 of whom have already been selected as suitable buyers.

McAdam, about an hour's drive southwest of Fredericton, is home to a historic railway station, a lakeside campground, local businesses and two manufacturing plants.

from CTV News - Atlantic http://bit.ly/2DQZMXa

[atlanticcanada]

The age of rail: A history of the McAdam train station

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.

from CTV News - Atlantic http://ift.tt/2wnm9wN