Although the station building at Espanola looked very much like a typical CPR depot it was, in fact, an original Algoma Eastern building. The station building was 40 x 26 feet with a 2' 1" bay window 11' 6" long in front of the ticket office. The downstairs layout consisted of a 15' 8" x 13' 2" waiting room on the south east corner. Immediately beside it was a 13' 6" x 11' 6" ticket office while a 10' wide baggage room occupied the entire north side of the building facing the paper mill. The back of the structure was occupied by the agent's quarters, with the 15' 8" x 10' 6" kitchen immediately behind the waiting room and the 13'x 11' 6" living room behind the ticket office. The second story was reached by a set of stairs which started in the kitchen along the back wall and turned to proceed up to the second story between the kitchen and living room. Four bedrooms quartered the second floor, all being accessed from a central landing at the top of the stair case. There were no closets in the bedrooms, and as was typical of the construction era, sanitation facilities consisted of the ubiquitous outhouse, in this case a 5' x 10' structure situated to the south of the freight station. Close examination of the first picture on this page indicates that by 1976 the south side of the structure sported no less that three plumbing vent pipes indicating that modern facilities had been retrofitted into the structure. There was no basement.
Like the Creighton depot this structure had a poured concrete exterior to the height of the first floor window line. This exterior surface was actually an integral part of the foundation which was 18" thick to the sill and joists of the first floor and 8" thick to the window line. The framing for the building was then constructed inside this exterior concrete "wainscoting". An ordinary brick veneer sat on top of the concrete and completed the sheathing of the first floor from the window line to the eaves. The second floor was originally sheathed in a continuation of the first floor roof's cedar shingles. This station along with the Creighton and a similar Algoma Central station at Steelton were unique amongst Canadian stations with the poured concrete first floor wall to the height of the window sashes. A March 18, 1916 evaluation of the AER notes that the Espanola station featured hot water heating and electric lights, the latter probably an advantage of being situated so close to the paper mill. This evaluation indicates that the Espanola station was the only one of the four stations on the line to be so equipped with these "modern" amenities. The dimensions shown for the station were taken from copies of a set of plans entitled " Algoma Central and Hudson Bay Railway and Algoma Eastern Railway Standard Station Building for Espanola, dated January 20, 1912 and approved by R.S. McCormick, the AER's Chief Engineer at the time. These plans are part of a donation recently made by the CPR to the Northern Ontario Railroad Museum and Heritage Centre at Capreol, Ontario.
After the demise of passenger service in 1963, the station was used by the CPR's maintenance services. The depot was demolished by the CPR in the early eighties. The Espanola station was located at the south end of the three track AER Espanola yard. The station shared a platform with the freight shed located about one hundred feet to the south of the depot. The photo to the left on this page is from a post card that appeared on eBay in 2001. Unfortunately I was only able to take a copy of the photo and the winner of the eBay auction refuses to answer my emails to him with regards to getting a decent scan. In any case the photo is labelled, "Algoma Eastern Railway, Espanola Stn" which dates the photo to likely sometime in the 1920s. The view is looking northward, likely from the freight house platform. It looks very much like the daily passenger train from Sudbury is nearing the station, a fact confirmed by the crowd in front of the station, the baggage cart in the foreground located to service the baggage car once the train stops and the drayage carts lined up against the platform. Note the wide wooden platform which was contiguous with the front Freight House platform and what looks like it might be an AER van parked on the siding in the middle right side of the photo.
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