Trains were used a lot around 1900 on P.E.I. Trains were used to ship goods, carry passengers around the Island, and sometimes were even used to carry bodies to the graveyard for burial.

The Prince Edward Island Railway started in May 1875, and the trains stopped running in 1989 because automobiles had become so popular. For a long time, trains were the most dependable transportation in the summer. In the winter, old-time trains had big plows on the front to clear the snow off the tracks.

Trains were a big part of Island travel, so every city and town had to have its own train station. (See the map in the picture for the station stops in 1884.) Most of the train stations were just little three-walled shacks, but some of them, like the Charlottetown train station, were huge stations.

The trains on P.E.I started out as narrow gauge. That means that the trains ran on tracks that were narrower than the ones Canada used. (P.E.I. was not part of Canada back then.) The P.E.I. government thought that they would never need to buy from Canada and that they could always get trains and track from Britain, where they also used narrow gauge. After P.E.I. joined Canada, P.E.I. eventually needed to make the tracks compatible with both narrow and wide gauge train tracks.

Prince Edward Island Railway Passenger Map, 1884
PARO, Acc 3466/HF70.499 pg 6