CP Hotels

Canadian Pacific Hotels was a division of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) that operated a series of resort hotels across Canada. Most of these hotels were originally built and operated by the railway's hotel department, while a few were acquired from Canadian National Hotels. Today, they are operated under the Fairmont name, and remain some of Canada's most exclusive hotels.

The CPR built two types of hotels: urban hotels and rural resort hotels. The urban hotels were located near a city's major passenger station and were intended for use by elite passengers of CPR trains. These hotels served businesspeople and visitors to the respective city, as well as passengers requiring overnight accommodation between connecting trains. The rural resort hotels were located in areas served by the CPR which had unique scenery, allowing these properties to be marketed as tourist destinations for passenger train travellers. Some of these resort hotels also served as "stationary dining cars", where en route passengers were fed and housed, without the train having to carry heavy dining and kitchen cars over difficult terrain.

The hotels were architecturally different in appearance, but materials such as granite walls and copper roofs were common elements. Many of these structures were constructed to look somewhat similar to European castles. One of the unique CPR hotels is the Chateau Montebello, which was for many years the world's largest log building. The Tudor style Algonquin in St. Andrews, New Brunswick also stands out as it was one of the few Canadian Pacific Hotels that was not constructed by CPR itself. The original hotels were built in the Rocky Mountains to attract tourists from eastern Canada, incorporating local attractions such as exceptional scenery and therapeutic mineral hot springs.

In 1886, the CPR had constructed a few small hotels to accommodate travellers, including Glacier House in Glacier National Park at Rogers Pass and Mount Stephen House in Field, British Columbia. Other small hotels were soon constructed at Kicking Horse Pass, North Bend in Fraser Canyon, Sicamous on Shuswap Lake, and Revelstoke. Some of the lesser pioneer hostelries were designed primarily to provide meal service for passengers in the Rocky Mountains, where railway grades were too severe to justify the operation of dining cars (see the Big Hill), although Glacier House and the Sicamous Hotel were destination hotels in their own right. All establishments operated successfully for a number of years, but were abandoned as hotels, when through dining car service made their maintenance unprofitable. Glacier House attracted considerable alpine patronage till diversion of the railway's main passenger service to the Southern Mainline left it considerably removed from the beaten track, and this resort too ceased to operate.

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Wikipedia