Returning from our August Gaspe adventure, David Morris and I stopped at a few railway-related places on highway 17. One of those was the old CN station in Kedgwick. The station is now privately owned, and is shared by a natural food co-op (with the sign "le Chemin Vers la Sante" / the way towards health) and the office of Dr. J.G. Bouchard.
The station and grounds are very nicely kept and it was a pleasure to visit it. Unfortunately we visited on a Sunday so the businesses were closed, so all we could do was walk around the outside. They have a railway crossing sign and an old switch on the grounds, together with a few dozen feet of track in the brush.
This is the back (track side) of the station.
There are also a couple of small outbuildings that I doubt were original railway buildings.
Kedgwick was mile 49.66 of the St. Quentin Subdivision, which ran from Tide Head outside Campbellton to the I.N.R. Junction near St. Leonard. In the 1953/04/26 CN employee timetable it shows that Kedgwick had a 20 car siding and 38 cars' worth of other tracks. In 1953 a mixed train (216/217) ran three days a week. The whole subdivision had a maximum speed of 20 MPH for freight trains, showing how lightly built it was.
The St. Quentin sub was originally going to be the Restigouche and Victoria Colonization Railway Company, and after some misadventures it became known as the International Railway Company (INR). It eventually became part of CN in 1923. CN applied to abandon the line in 1983, and it was finally permitted to abandon the line in 1989.
We also visited the new St. Quentin station, a recently built replica of the previous station. That's a post for another time.
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