Laggan was the railway-era name for present-day Lake Louise Village: first a siding and service point on the Canadian Pacific Railway, then a tiny mountain settlement tied to the station, helper engines, and the growing tourist trade at the lake.

Railway name

The name was borrowed from a parish in Inverness-shire, Scotland. CPR track reached the site in 1884, and the station name “Laggan” entered maps, timetables, and survey reports before Lake Louise became the dominant tourist identity. George Mercer Dawson used both Lake Louise and Laggan in the period when the landscape was being formalized for government maps and railway promotion.

A service place before a resort

Laggan mattered first as an operating point, not a destination. Trains climbing and descending the Kicking Horse corridor needed crews, water, wood or coal, and in the Big Hill era often helper locomotives. The settlement that formed near the station served railway staff, guides, outfitters, and the first visitors heading up-valley to Chateau Lake Louise and the glacier country above.

The station and the name shift

The best surviving remnant of old Laggan is the Lake Louise Railway Station, whose earlier 1890 log depot was moved to Heritage Park in Calgary and preserved there as “Laggan Station.” As the lake and chalet became famous, “Lake Louise” gradually displaced “Laggan” in everyday use. The railway station itself kept the older name into the early twentieth century before the tourist name won out completely.

Traces in the modern village

The old name still lingers around the area. Laggan’s Mountain Bakery in the village keeps the railway-era name alive for modern visitors, and Laggan’s Loop preserves it on one of the easiest winter trails above the lake. For most people the word now reads as local color, but historically it was the name that linked the settlement, the station, and the early rail economy.