Toronto Union Station Part 1

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I'm in a little bit of a homesick mode so I will spend some time writing about a station I've known quite well and can't wait to go back to one of these sunny days. Though not that there isn't any information here which one cannot easily find elsewhere on the internet.

Tracing back to the beginning, the Union Station as we know it today is actually the third Union Station the City of Toronto has seen. The first Union Station was built in 1858 in a location west of the current one by Grand Trunk, Northern, and Great Western Railway (and in those days, the North meant Lake Simcoe, and the West meant London and Windsor). Front Street was literally on the water front until the early 1900s.

Union Station viewed from Lake Ontario
Toronto soon had outgrown her original Union Station and a second Union Station replaced the original one at the same spot in 1873. It had a very British looking train shed and housed 3 tracks. With the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway at Union Station in 1884, another train shed with 3 additional tracks was required and added in 1892 with expansions to the station head house.

Architectural drawing of the expanded Union Station
Photograph from 1927 of the same station, not that the water front is no longer there
I'm not going to pretend I know much about architecture except for the fact that I admire the tasteful ones in my personal opinion, therefore I'm not making any remarks here about it. A couple of excellent and not-too-long articles on Wikipedia and the Toronto Railway Historical Association do expand on my briefness above (however the article on the TRHA website does contain spoilers for what's coming up here in the next couple of weeks).

Comments

Andy_in_Germany said…
That train shed liiks more like a baby Cologne or Karlsruhe roof to me than a UK station.

That was one of the best locations for a station I've ever seen though. A shame it didn't stay that way...
Feb 28, 2014, 4:30:00 PM
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