Beatty’s
A documented Grand Trunk-era station west of Maple Lake, with a 1907 railway-archive lead still being investigated.
Railway archaeology
Lost stops & railway names
Beatty’s, Rankins, Otter Lake, Walls, Mud Lake and James Bay Junction — names that help reconstruct how the railway worked.
Not every railway name became a village. Between the better-known communities were platforms, sidings, junctions and tiny stopping places that can disappear almost completely once the railway is gone. This section gives those names a place in the record.
Western station sequence. Mileage shown is a historical distance reference converted to distance east of Depot Harbour from a compiled station-distance list. The diagram is meant to show order and spacing, not exact track geometry.
Why preserve the small names?
A timetable name can represent many different things: a staffed station, a flag stop, a siding, a mill spur, a junction, a postal locality, or simply a place railway employees needed to identify. Their importance is not measured by the size of the station building. Together they explain how trains actually moved through the western end of the OA&PS.
Rankins
A construction-era milestone: the western railway reached Rankins in 1894 before pushing onward toward Rose Point.
Otter Lake
A railway point shared by two railway systems, and one of the best-documented minor names near Falding.
James Bay Junction
The place where Parry Sound finally obtained a direct railway connection to the old Canada Atlantic/OA&PS line.
Walls
A later railway/locality name near the eastern edge of this site’s western-corridor coverage.
Mud Lake Siding
A siding name preserved in station lists and railway profile material between Walls and Sprucedale.
Research status matters
Where the documentary record is strong, the site says so. Where a marker is reconstructed from mileage and station order, it is explicitly labelled approximate. The goal is to improve the map as track charts, land plans, employee timetables and field evidence are found.