Toronto Union Station Part 1

By -
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
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Amtrak NPCU

By -
Image
The NPCU or Non-powered Control Units are control cars used by Amtrak that are modified from surplus EMD F40PH locomotives. A control car is a generic term for a non-powered railroad vehicle that can control operation of a train from the end opposite to the position of the locomotive. They can be used with diesel or electric motive power, allowing push-pull operation without the use of an additional locomotive. Control cars first appeared in the USA and France in 1960s. Trains operating with a locomotive at one end and a control car at the other do not require the locomotive to run around to the opposite end of the train when reversing direction. In the United States, most control cars are modified from retired locomotives by removing tractive equipment and adding side baggage doors and have been used on several passenger railroads. The control cars are connected through the consist of the train by standard AAR 27-wire multiple unit jumper cables. The NPCUs at Amtrak are a
Read more

Briefly on the AAR Coupler Part 2

By -
Image
Last week, we've identified the Janney coupler and briefly looked at its elegant design. This week, let's, again, very briefly, look at the different types of Janney coupler that are widely used today. I will only talk about the head of the coupler, and ignore anything that the general public may need to trespass onto railroad property and get in a unsafe situation in order to have a good look at. As far as coupler heads are concerned, there are 3 types in used today. Type E, F, and H. Types E and F are used on freight, and H used on passenger equipment. Since the withdrawal of passenger service in North America by private railroads, the Type H standard is no longer maintained by the Association of American Railroads, a trade group formed of major freight railroads, but is under the control of the APTA, the American Public Transportation Association. Now let me introduce another term, slack. Slack is an allowed gap between two coupled up couplers. In other words, when most
Read more

SD70ACu

By Yi -
Image
After the post on the shiny rebuilt GE road power, it's only fair to have a look into what Progress Rail has to offer on their side of the table. I'm using the company's recently-changed, formal name of course. For those who are not up-to-date on the current state of North American railroading affairs, Progress Rail is the company (owned by Caterpillar) that purchased EMD a few years ago. The SD90MAC was arguably the biggest gong show in EMD's recent memory. It happened at a time when they were comfortably resting on their laurels, unaware the fateful changes that were about to occur in the locomotive market in the not-so-distant future (they got beaten badly by GE). What was supposed to be one of the most remarkable locomotives whose presence is to grace the mainlines in modern history, turned out to be an utter disaster (I'll redirect further readings to Wikipedia). As a result, today, the number of SD90s still in operation on a Class 1 Railroad is, if not id
Read more