Description of Historic Place

The Greater Winnipeg Water District (GWWD) Railway Station, built in 1929, is a small, elegant building that stands in an industrial district of the St. Boniface area of Winnipeg. The City of Winnipeg designation applies to the building on its footprint.

Heritage Value

The GWWD Railway Station is a small but important and visible manifestation of one of the province's early and ambitious public works - the Winnipeg Aqueduct. The aqueduct, completed in 1919, still supplies water to the Winnipeg area from Shoal Lake on the Manitoba-Ontario border, and it is from this station that maintenance workers and supplies continue to be dispatched along the rail line that extends to the lake. The building, designed by William Fingland, is also a rare Manitoba example of a modest stone-clad railway station, whose handsome design and walls of granite blocks - quarried along the GWWD line in southeastern Manitoba - make it a local landmark in its St. Boniface neighbourhood.

Source: City of Winnipeg Committee on Planning and Community Services Minutes, November 10, 1995

Character-Defining Elements

Key elements that define the heritage character of the GWWD Railway Station site include:
- its location in an industrial sector of St. Boniface, at the entrance of a municipal yard that includes a sprawling complex of rail lines, many of the original repair shops and storage areas supporting the railway and aqueduct, a pumphouse and a municipally designated water tower


Key elements that define the station's exterior heritage character include:
- its picturesque longitudinal one-storey form, with the roofline featuring a cross gable through the middle to form a projecting bay, and with parapet gables on either side
- the wall materials of red, pink and grey granite, set up in a cyclopean pattern, and the extensive stone detailing of quoins on the corners, gable returns and heads and sills for the windows and doors
- the original window and door openings, picturesque and varied to identify the freight and passenger areas of the building, and the generous semicircular windows beneath each of the end gables and in the centre bay gable, with radiating glazing bars
- details such as the raised letters reading 'G.W.W.D. RAILWAY STATION' on the northwest gable, a date stone reading 1929 on the east gable end, and ball-and-torch lamps placed on all elevations