CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: Vancouver's Waterfront Station

Paragraph A

The terminal overlooking Vancouver's waterfront is the third structure the Canadian Pacific Railway has erected in that corner of the city. The earliest stood at Port Moody, well beyond the fledgling downtown, back in the 1880s, while its successor, near Granville Street, survived little more than a decade. The present building, the work of a Montreal architectural partnership, received its first passengers in 1914 and thereafter served for half a century as the western terminus of the company's transcontinental line. Travellers descending beneath its columns had typically endured several days aboard a train originating in Montreal or Toronto.

Paragraph B

The structure is a deliberate exercise in neoclassical grandeur. Its red-brick façade is rigorously symmetrical, fronted by a row of pale, fluted columns in the Greek manner that reappears indoors along the walls of a spacious waiting hall. Suspended above that interior colonnade are sweeping landscape murals, completed two years after the terminal's opening, depicting the scenery a passenger would encounter along the transcontinental route. Federal recognition as a National Historic Site arrived roughly six decades later. A subsequent restoration cleaned and stabilized the exterior brickwork, though the interior fittings were left untouched.

Paragraph C

Its function as an intercity terminal ceased during the 1970s. VIA Rail, which had assumed responsibility for the passenger services of both national railways, gradually shifted its Vancouver operations to the Canadian National terminal at the opposite edge of downtown. The final scheduled departure, bound for Montreal, carried roughly two hundred passengers on an October afternoon in 1979. Within a few years the platforms and a portion of the adjoining tracks had been dismantled, opening up a broad corridor of land beside and beneath the historic building — ground along which the region's first rapid-transit line would later be laid.

Paragraph D

The building was, meanwhile, acquiring an entirely different civic function. The SeaBus, a passenger ferry, began operating from an adjacent berth two years before that final train departure, ferrying commuters across the harbour to Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver in scarcely a quarter of an hour. Rapid transit arrived within the decade, when the inaugural SkyTrain line opened directly from the station. A commuter rail service from the eastern suburbs followed ten years afterward, and a further line running south to Richmond and the airport was added early in this century. Four distinct services now converge on the site, which handles the heaviest volume of daily traffic anywhere on the regional transit network — somewhere in the neighbourhood of 50,000 movements.

Paragraph E

Not given in any of the above paragraphs.