Today much of the site of the former rail yard in Palmerston is a largely a vast open area.
It is hard to imagine that tract of land, almost in the centre of the town, was once filled with a dozen or so buildings and structures, and tracks holding strings of rail cars. Dozens of trains came and went daily, and locomotives shuffled cars around the clock.
There were occurrences that gave variety to the dull daily routine of a regional railway centre.
Until the early decades of the 20th century, rail officials and employees themselves had a cavalier attitude to safety. Railroaders regarded scrapes, cuts and broken limbs as a part of the job.
Serious injuries were relatively common. Men with missing digits or limbs, if they could still work, were assigned duties they could handle with their handicaps.
Some were not so lucky. Between 1872 and 1920 at least a dozen men died from injuries sustained in that rail yard.
There were also crimes of various sorts over the years. Standing freight cars attracted thieves, who would break into them and cart off merchandise. Residents near the yards would often sneak around at night to gather a basket or scuttle of coal in the darkness of a moonless night. And there were always a few unemployed men who preferred to travel without a ticket, and who were responsible for petty thefts and vandalism. They were adept at hopping a freight train as it left the yards.
Rail employees acquired skill at spotting irregular activities in the yard and challenging trespassers. One of the more interesting of such cases took place during the winter of 1886.
On January 19 of that year, a man named Jim Brown showed up at the Palmerston yard, driving a team and sleigh. He left the horses near the station, and picked up a lantern used by railway employees to find their way around the yards after dark.
Brown acted like he was in the yard on legitimate business.
He walked up and down the tracks, checking the numbers of the cars. Eventually he found the one he wanted. He went back to the station, and led his team to the door of the car. Brown broke open the seal on the door, and began unloading the car, which was filled with an order of dry goods for a store farther up the line.
Brown had barely started unloading the car when a yard man, who had spotted the activity, walked up.
Before the yard man could say anything, Brown accosted him, inquiring where the freight clerk was. Brazenly, he took an offended and aggressive line with the yard man. He threatened to report the yard crew to their superiors for their failure to assist him in unloading the car.
Brown’s acting performance was so good that he convinced the yard man that he was in the yard on legitimate business. He continued to load up his sleigh, and then attempted to drive off. But he was too greedy. He had overloaded the sleigh, which became stuck in the snow and ice between the tracks.
While Brown attempted to free the sleigh, the yard man returned. The man thought it best to placate what appeared to be one of the railway’s customers.
He went off to the freight shed and returned with a pinch bar, which he used to free the sleigh.
Brown then departed the yard nonchalantly, and headed up the road to his farm on the outskirts of Harriston.
A freight clerk spotted the theft the next morning, and immediately reported it to the divisional offices in Stratford. The Grand Trunk sent up one of its railway detectives, a man named McCarthy, on the next train to Palmerston.
McCarthy followed the trail in the snow left by Brown, and then asked questions of local people who might have seen a heavily loaded sleigh the previous evening. By the afternoon of that day he had traced the sleigh to Harriston, and had identified the driver as Jim Brown, who was well known in the area. McCarthy showed up at Brown’s farm, and poked around a little before knocking on the door.
Brown vehemently denied having been in Palmerston the previous evening, and claimed he had no knowledge of any theft at the railway yard. McCarthy then asked him to explain the stolen items he had discovered a few minutes earlier, casually dropped beside Brown’s house.
McCarthy’s questions rattled Brown, who seemed to have thought that he had pulled off a perfect crime. Brown admitted that he was the perpetrator of the theft, and he showed McCarthy where he had hidden the rest of the goods taken from the boxcar at Palmerston. There were caches all over Brown’s 200-acre property, much of which was bush.
The purloined packages and crates of goods were easy to find by following Brown’s footprints and the sleigh tracks in the snow.
McCarthy arranged for the return of the stolen goods to the Harriston station, and the forwarding of the shipment to the consignee. Jim Brown travelled in the other direction, in custody, to a small cell in the Guelph jail. At his first hearing he entered a plea of guilty, and was held over for sentencing.
Local papers made much more of the theft than it deserved. The Palmerston Spectator, in an article copied by papers in Fergus, Mount Forest, and probably elsewhere, described Brown as “a daring robber,” and the incident as “the boldest railway car robbery ever attempted in Canada.” It would have been more accurate to confine the geographic area to Wellington County, or even Palmerston.
Brown had his next day in court on Feb. 15, after almost a month in custody. He confirmed his plea of guilty before Judge George Drew. Only the bare outline of the case was mentioned in court. Judge Drew sentenced Brown to a year in jail with hard labour. The case took less than 10 minutes of the court’s time.
Brown was a mature man when he committed the robbery. Newspapers characterized him as “a prosperous farmer,” though it is quite possible that he was suffering financially, like many farmers during the 1880s, as agricultural commodities continued a long period of decline that began in 1872 and would continue until the mid 1890s.
Much of the shipment of dry goods he stole was of little use to him and his family. He may well have been unhinged mentally when he raided the boxcar.
There is also a possibility that he planned to sell the goods to a store. In any case, no answers came out in court.
There were some other unanswered questions regarding the case. Brown seemed to know exactly what he was looking for, and the number of the car in which the goods were located. It is obvious that Brown had some information that came from a railway employee.
Detective McCarthy and the Grand Trunk Railway may well have dealt with the suspected employee internally, assuming they could identify the culprit.
No details of that aspect of the case came up in court, and Judge Drew did not ask any questions.
There was much more to the case than came out in court or in the newspapers of the time, but neither Brown nor his lawyer made any statements or explanations.
Today, more than a century and a quarter later, the case is another of the interesting curiosities that enliven our local history. And for Palmerston, it is another tale associated with the history of its railway yard.