Grand Trunk Railway Adams & Westlake

One of the more plentiful bellbottoms lanterns around nowadays are Grand Trunk Railway Bellbottoms. Truth be told, the Grand Trunk bought many, many, bellbottom lanterns, and Grand Trunk items have a decent track record of survival, likely because when the Canadian National took over, all Grand Trunk items were surplussed, or kept by employees. One of the models the Grand Trunk seemed to like were Adams & Westlake bellbottoms, especially in the 1890s.

One of the more unique identifiers of Grand Trunk lanterns of the area are ice spikes. These Ice Spikes did exactly what you expect, hold the lantern if it was placed on uneven icy terrain when the conductor needed to throw a switch or other activities during the winter. These ice spikes are neat reminder of how difficult operations in the winter were for railways back then, and how their tools needed to be specially adapted for the environment.

This lantern is an example of the typical GTR lantern of the 1890s, including ice spikes. Made by Adams and Westlake, these are one of the few lanterns that fully spell out Grand Trunk on them. This model also came in a glass fount variant, however this one is tin. The globe is cast with GTR in a panel.