School trains.
They were also known as school cars and schools on wheels.
The steam locomotives chugged and chuffed along the tracks of Northern Ontario, blowing their whistles and bringing schooling to children in isolated communities. Children of railway workers, trappers, loggers and hunters. Children of the bush.
Children who had no other way of accessing a physical school building.
It was a novel six-month experiment that lasted 40 years, from 1926 to 1967.
The program was an unprecedented collaboration between Ontario’s then Ministry of Education and the railways: Canadian National and Canadian Pacific. It combined what we’d now call remote education, homeschooling and nation-building.
The first two trains left the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto on a warm September evening in 1926.
One train carried teacher Walter McNally, and headed for North Bay, Ont. The other carried Fred Sloman and his young family to Sudbury, Ont., and then further north to Foleyet and Capreol.