emailLochside Regional Trail
Learning Centre
Cultural History
Riding the Rails
The Lochside Trail began life in 1917 as the rail bed of the Canadian Northern Pacific Railway. A daily 74 passenger General Electric gas car carried passengers and freight between Victoria and a steamship dock at Patricia Bay, at a cost of three cents per mile one way, or five cents return.
Passenger service continued until the 1920s, when stiff competition from motor cars, buses and other railways forced the Canadian Northern Pacific into bankruptcy. The Canadian National Railway (CNR) took over, operating freight trains on the line until the 1930s. Freight continued to rumble along a spur line past Swan Lake until 1990.
Living Off the Land
The First Peoples of what is now Saanich (from a Coast Salish word meaning "fertile soil") and the Peninsula were intimately connected to the land, harvesting fish, plants and animals for food, basketry and other needs. When Governor James Douglas claimed the land and signed the Douglas Treaties in 1852, he carved this area into farm-sized blocks. The new British and European settlers continued to depend on the land for their daily needs, growing vegetables, grains, flowers, and bulbs, making jams and wines, breeding horses and even mink.
Although subdivisions and shopping areas have gradually replaced the immense land holdings and acres of greenhouses, names such as Blenkinsop, Rendle and Borden evoke the long agricultural history of this area. Borden Mercantile is still run by the pioneering family that settled in the Blenkinsop Valley in 1894.
