The Chateau Qu'Appelle was a

Grand Trunk Pacific Railway The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway was a historic Canadian transcontinental railway running from Fort William, Ontario (now Thunder Bay) to Prince Rupert, British Columbia, a Pacific coast port. East of Winnipeg the line continued as the National Tra ...

hotel planned for

Regina, Saskatchewan Regina () is the capital city of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. The city is the second-largest in the province, after Saskatoon, and is a commercial centre for southern Saskatchewan. As of the 2021 census, Regina had a city populatio ...

. Construction was started in 1913 at the corner of Albert Street and 16th Avenue (now College Avenue). Rising costs, labour and material shortages, and the bankruptcy of the railway stopped the project before it was completed. The unfinished structure was eventually dismantled. Designed in the Scottish baronial style, the concrete pilings were sunk in 1913 to support the ten-storey structure. As well, there were two sub-storeys of reinforced concrete basement under the northwest corner of Wascana Park. The hotel's girders were already up when construction was halted

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

had broken out, and the combination of labour shortages and material rationing meant that the lavish hotel's construction would be delayed until after the war. However, construction never resumed; in 1919, the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway went bankrupt. The Canadian National Railway, a government-owned venture, eventually acquired the GTP's lines, but the construction project was never completed. For ten years, the five-storey-high steel skeleton of the Chateau Qu'Appelle became an embarrassing eyesore for the city. The land was eventually given back to the city, and the girders were dismantled. The steel beams from the project were eventually used in the construction of Regina's new lavish railroad hotel, the

Hotel Saskatchewan The Hotel Saskatchewan is a historic hotel, one of Canada's grand railway hotels located in downtown Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, overlooking Victoria Park. The Hotel Saskatchewan was the fourteenth hotel in a nationwide chain constructed and ...

. Other building materials intended for the hotel had also been used to construct two houses for James Kirkpatrick, superintendent of the Grand Trunk's station on College Avenue. The

Royal Saskatchewan Museum The Royal Saskatchewan Museum (RSM) is a Canadian natural history museum in Regina, Saskatchewan. Founded in 1906, it is the first museum in Saskatchewan, and the first provincial museum in the three Prairie Provinces. The institution was formed ...

, built to celebrate the province's 50th anniversary and opening in 1955, now stands on the site of the ill-fated Chateau Qu'Appelle Hotel. Partly for aesthetic reasons and partly to avoid the expensive task of uprooting the pilings, the museum was built on an angle with a large front lawn covering the basement of the ill-fated hotel.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Chateau Qu'appelle Grand Trunk Pacific Railway hotels Hotels in Saskatchewan Buildings and structures in Regina, Saskatchewan Scottish baronial architecture in Canada Unbuilt buildings and structures in Canada