The Sawmill at Lost Channel served by the Key Valley Railway
The two key locations on the KVR were Pakesley and Lost Channel. The major attributes of each village is given below:
Lost Channel
the company sawmill;
the company town site;
a station serving both the townsite and the local lake steamer;
a wye for turning locomotives;
a small yard to support the local trackage.
Pakesley
the interchange with the Canadian Pacific Railway;
the main lumber storage yards;
a station on the Canadina Pacific for passengers transferring to and from the KVR;
a wye for turning locomotives;
the likely location of the KVR engine facilities.
I have also found references to two other important KVR locations between Lost Channel and Pakesley. They are:
Camp Six (about half way between Pakesley and Lost Channel)
one of the company’s logging camps, with a road connecting it to other camps lying to the north;
a log loading area;
possibly a passing siding.
Cole’s Siding (just west of Lost Channel)
a connection to a short branch where log loading occurred;
The Key Valley Railway (KVR) was a standard gauge railway that ran between the villages of Pakesley and Lost Channel in Ontario between 1917 and 1933. It was constructed to transport logs, lumber and people to and from the company’s lumber mill at Lost Channel.
The general location of the Key Valley is given in the following map obtained from Google. The Key Valley was just 12 miles long; the western end met the Canadian Pacific Railway at Pakesley; the eastern end was the company town of Lost Channel.
The construction of the standard gauge Key Valley Railway was started by the Lauder, Spears and Howland Company in 1914. Before the railway was built, the company used a rugged bush trail to haul lumber to a siding on the Canadian National Railway. Unfortunately, the trail was difficult to maintain and was often impassible. The new railroad, named the Key Valley Railway for the narrow valley in which the roadbed lay, would head directly west of Lost Channel to connect with the Canadian Pacific Railway at Pakesley. Unfortunately, the construction costs of the railway almost bankrupted the Lauder, Spears and Howland Company. In 1917, the Schroeder Mills and Timber Company bought up the financially troubled Lauder company and finished the railway.
In the 1920’s, Lost Channel was a bustling place. The sawmill there was the largest in the area. Within the town site proper, about 300 people lived. Along with the Schroeder Company’s bunkhouses and cookeries for its workers, Lost Channel had stores, a hospital and a school. They even had electrical power.
The railway also connected with the steamship “Kawigamog” which served various villages and resorts on the Pickerel River system. By the mid 1920’s, upwards of 1,200 hunters a year passed over the KVR and onto the “Kawigamog” to arrive the Kawigamog Lodge.
At the other end of the KVR, Pakesley also grew. Here, the Schroeder Company kept its large lumber storage yards from which it supplied the Toronto, Detroit, Chicago and New York markets. In the 1920’s, Pakesley grew to include a post office and a hotel as well as receiving a new CPR station in 1924 to handle the increased passenger traffic to and from Lost Channel.
In 1927, the Schroeder Company, perhaps recognizing that their lumber limits were nearing exhaustion, sold the company to a new company, the Pakesley Lumber Company. In 1930, a devastating fire destroyed the Lost Channel mill, and by 1933, Lost Channel was a ghost town. Pakesley survived into the 1960’s as an important CPR section house, but by 1970, it too had become a ghost town.
