Amazing Ghost Town Left With Trolley Busses | Abandoned Sandon | Destination Adventure

ever since i was a kid all i wanted to be was an explorer sail the seven seas find new worlds but uncle d everything's already been found what like everything well yeah oh man well so much for that but if i can't be an explorer i can still be an adventurer so i bought a motorhome and i'm hitting the open road my name is dustin porter and this is destination adventure [Music] you doing all right [Music] just a quick drive today like one or two hours should be nice there are hundreds of ghost towns in canada and most of them are mining towns but there's only two ghost cities and this is one of them [Music] i guess sandon i would say it was the it's like the fort mcmurray of 130 years ago in those years it was one of the greatest silver mining districts in the world and canada's wealthiest minds here for a period of time in the very late 1800s endless amounts of young people wanting to come here and dreams of making their fortune and of course you know wages that were several times higher than the average canadian wage what they didn't know in a lot of cases was how deadly the working conditions were they had the latest technology here it was one of the first places in canada to become highly mechanized so things like electricity and compressed air came here very early on and in many cases before rules and regulations around it or even allowed knowledge and so so hydroelectricity came here shortly after niagara falls which was the birthplace of hydroelectricity in the world [Applause] it would seem that there were about five thousand residents right in the city of santa itself and then there was another 2300 that lived at the mining camps up up in and around the mines so so that work force would typically in a mine they would work six days 12 hour days and saturday night they'd be free and you know money flowing out of their pockets they'd come to town and and so they would descend on sand and from high in the hills they'd come down here and add to that two railways with passenger trains coming and going every day so on a saturday night there was probably close to 10 000 people here with a density of something like hong kong you know all kinds of gambling establishments and theaters a huge red light district with probably three times more brothels than they were saloons but there were there were roughly 30 saloons and sand the city was bursting at the seams so they they built on every square inch they could find and and up the hills there there were streets all up on the side hills here as well and then then you had to factor in two railroads both coming into the valley and ending here at sandon so you know space was a a big problem today it's much harder to envision just simply because the the forest cover is closing in again and there there was barely a blade of grass standing here in sand in the early years and every every usable tree was cut for timbers or lumber you know there was a huge demand for it [Music] every major kind of calamity has happened here in a boom city like sandon the the first decade was the dominant decade that that's when most things happened here probably less happened in the next 100 years than happened in the first decade so so sandon went through this enormous growth spurt in the beginning and then of course being that the city was was built of wood that was the local material the fire was inevitable and and then in sand and because of the density here that a lot of the streets were only 20 feet wide many three and four story buildings and they were one against another so once the fire got going it was really hard to stop it when the big fire happened in 1900 the population was already beginning to decline so the the second rebuilding the the confidence wasn't there to build a lot of buildings with brick and stone so most of the post-fire buildings were also built of wood [Music] in the valley bottom you had three principal streets that that were parallel to the valley rico street being the earliest of the the main streets then the street they called main street so that was the creek was running under that street and then this street here slokan star street was was kind of the industrial street and it it was right alongside the canadian pacific railroad here today it all looks strange because of course the river has returned to kind of more of its natural channel and and people look at it and think well this is a strange place the buildings face the river rather than the street but but then of course that's all changed since these buildings were built [Music] one of the famous features of salmon was was the uh incredible flume that carried the river right through the the downtown and it was underneath the main street and so it was a beautiful wooden street on the top the creek was everything it was the sewer that's where all the sewer pipes came into the flume there were trap doors at intervals along the street where you could open it up and dump your garbage most streets and towns were sort of a slop of horse manure and everything else you know in mud and here they had this beautiful clean wooden street and the river finally flowed underneath it and and of course they could just dump their garbage down the trap doors so standing didn't have a garbage dump but it was unlike a lot of people mine [Music] that structure had to be capable of carrying all that flow of debris during pressure which includes boulders as big as volkswagens it's amazing that it worked for almost 60 years today we would say it was built way too small you know and and the other problem it had is it it had two significant bends in the flume in that bend it was the perfect place for logs and debris to jam in there in the spring of 55 it plugged with logs and there there weren't sufficient people here to to deal with unjamming it and of course in no time it backed up with debris and boulders and everything and the water had only one place to go and that was down through the streets and it tore up the streets of sandon and left it in a horrible mess the flume was ultimately sanden's undoing i guess you could say it was the the final straw that that led to people abandoning it completely you know sandon when i was a kid there were still 200 buildings here but what happened to our history we tore it down for lumber and bricks not even salvage rates in a lot of cases it you know it was so commonplace for the buildings to be under demolition here people just came up and and took them and in a lot of cases some of some of the bigger more prominent ones were actually sold for nominal amounts of money and people came up here took what they wanted discarded the rest sanded was just one enormous pile of wreckage here you know when i was young and now it's looking a whole lot more beautiful but sadly all those great buildings were wrecked and in most cases for pittance when i first started to really see the importance of saving this very few others did and all my co-workers which you know were employed in sand and make it making good money here because the mines continued up until 1993 but the those people that worked with me they often they just you know shook their heads and said why why do you even care you know why'd you burn them down they're just old fire hazards dilapidated derelicts and and they didn't see them as history sadly too late for a lot of those original buildings [Music] the trolley buses are really a super interesting part of sandon's modern history sandon has been basically a refuge for a number of of different groups and number of things over the years these were fabulous vehicles they were built by the forerunner of bombardier canadian car and and it utilized a factory that during world war ii was producing airplane fuselages and wings high quality air aluminum craftsmanship in in aircraft construction between 1946 and 54 they they manufactured these very high quality trolleys and and 15 canadian cities ended up building their systems and utilizing them [Music] there there was a a series of events that that happened uh expo 86 came along and the theme of expo while it was originally supposed to be called transpo and it was the chance for british columbia to show the world our our modernness and in the field of transportation but to the embarrassment of the politicians in vancouver the vast bulk of people were still moved on on decades-old electric trolley buses so they decided they had to go and they ordered 300 brand new electric trolley buses from western fire in winnipeg and they were delivered to vancouver ahead of expo and they got the old ones out of sight and pretended they didn't exist anymore years later a very interesting man became the ceo of translink in vancouver his name was david stumple and he had been the manager of the transit system in san francisco and i think his dad had been the manager of philadelphia transit cities that both experimented with vintage transit equipment refurbished it put it into the fleets and and in san francisco it it put san francisco on the map in many respects so people today when they think of san francisco they think of riding a trolley he became aware of this yard full of these ancient real trolley buses built by canadian car unfortunately david got terminated and his successor as seems to happen in bc politics immediately targeted everything that he had done and so david's project was was terminated and and immediately relegated to scrap so so at that point all these historical trolleys were going to be scrapped that's when my phone began to ring there were kind of two requests one is they needed a place to to keep them in safety until things ironed out politically and then the other aspect was how to get them here we were in a good position to help because our our family was in the heavy truck transport industry so there was a period of time there several years ago where where over 200 of these historic trolleys were were scrapped but fortunately we had an opportunity to work with the scrap dealer and we we salvaged a lot of the things that were of nominal scrap value but they were important for the the ultimate restoration of the vehicles and and we were able to save a good sample of vehicles from across canada the project as it sits is that uh there's 15 trolleys preserved one to represent each of the 15 cities in canada that had electric trolley systems and the the ultimate idea is still to follow through with david's plan which would be to refurbish them and put them back into the vancouver fleet making this video ended up being much more personal to me than i thought and that's because of hal over the last 50 years all the time the money the effort that's gone into preserving sand and that's all been hal and that's much the same as where i started with this youtube channel so i really want to thank all of my patrons that helped make it possible for me to go and make these videos and share with all of you so thank you

Channel: Destination Adventure

Views: 394,081

Rating: 4.9142585 out of 5

Keywords: sandon, BC, British Columbia, canada, abandoned, lost, forgotten, urbex, history, historical, discover, discovered, discovery, beautiful, adventure, explore, motorhome, moho, winnebago, adventurer, nomad, nomadic, tiny home, travel

Id: E8I0EI0jUnM

Length: 14min 53sec (893 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SirToxalot]

The buses were never there back in the day. A guy who lives there has been collecting them.

https://globalnews.ca/news/1412027/ghost-town-mysteries-the-old-trolley-buses-of-sandon-b-c/

[u/sugaholic]

Nice! I'm heading there in a few days!