Updated: New life for Windsor terminal?

This year, I'm trying to focus the blog on a little bit more rail history, and I wanted to research a few posts on the crossroads of Eastern Canada, Windsor, Ontario. Windsor is a town not unlike Winnipeg and Chicago. It has a long history of being a major junction for all kinds of railroads, much like Winnipeg and Chicago continue to be. 

It might surprise some people to know that the following railways once called on Windsor: Great Western, Wabash (through trackage rights), Norfolk and Western, Norfolk Southern, Pere Marquette, Chesapeake and Ohio, Chessie System, CSX, Canada Southern, Michigan Central, New York Central, Penn Central and Conrail. Some of these railways are, of course, one in the same (CASO, MCRR, NYC) and some are successor roads (Wabash, N&W, NS as well as NYC, PC and Conrail). Still, that's a lot of rail activity for a city with an urban population of 300,000, including suburbs. 

Today, the Canadian Pacific (CPKC for the less sentimental), Canadian National and Via Rail still serve the city, alongside one of Canada's oldest short lines, the Essex Terminal Railway. 

There are many reasons for Windsor's heavy rail presence throughout its history, not the least of which is Windsor's longstanding status as a major automaker. 

Car ferry on the Detroit River in the 1950s. Photo from Library and Archives Canada

 

But when you think of Windsor's rail history, you might be missing an important piece of the puzzle, which is Hiram Walker, the man who founded a distillery in what was then the independent town of Walkerville. The historic community, which was annexed amalgamated into Windsor in 1935, is in the northern* part of the city, the oldest area of which contains the Hiram Walker distillery, which dates back to Hiram Walker himself, who founded the business in 1858. The Canadian Club brand lives on, although it is owned by Suntory Global Spirits now.

 

(* - On a map, the tip of Walkerville is indeed in the northern part of the city next to the Detroit River, but as my friend from Windsor points out, locals do not use the term North Windsor, rather they describe the city more on an east-west axis. Walkerville, it should be noted, also extends quite far from the city's northern boundary with the Detroit River.)

 

Long story short, the distillery created a town, which eventually began to attract the automotive industry, and the railways were there to serve all industry, of course.

 

Photo from the Southwestern Ontario Digital Archives at the University of Windsor. Photo is meant for research purposes only and should not be copied or used in any other way.

Walkerville should be a familiar name to rail passengers, as the city's station was commonly known in Windsor as Walkerville. To the unwary traveller unfamiliar with Windsor, the dual names might have been confusing, much like Fallowfield in Ottawa might be today.

The first railway to have a major passenger station in Walkerville was the Pere Marquette, a Michigan road that was eventually folded into the Chesapeake and Ohio. Its station in Walkerville, like the city's other stations, was impressive.

Photo from the Southwestern Ontario Digital Archives at the University of Windsor

 

This shot above shows what the station looked like in 1957 before it was torn down. By this time, passenger service had long since vanished. C&O's predecessor Pere Marquette stopped most of its passenger service in Canada in the 1930s, including its operations from Sarnia to Chatham and its operations in Windsor.

 

I won't get into all the permutations that followed among Windsor's many railways, as that can be shared in subsequent posts. For our purposes, Walkerville once again hosted passenger service a little way down the line from this C&O station when CN ran its passenger operations out of its station, beginning in 1961. That station served CN and its successor, Via Rail for many years, until the city's new station was built in 2012.

 

This shot above, courtesy of blog reader Kevin O'Neil, shows what the old passenger station looked like in the early 1980s. Kevin helped me sort through the many bits of Windsor rail history, which was helpful in putting this first Windsor post together.

The new station for Via Rail was completed in 1012, at a cost of $5.3 million. It acts as the western terminus of Via Rail's operations in the Quebec City-Windsor eastern corridor. Here's a shot I took when I visited the station last November, as an eastbound Venture set was ready to begin its trip to Toronto. This shot is from the west end of the station.

In what might be a full-circle moment, the Via Rail Windsor station might once again host through trains, as Via Rail and Amtrak have discussed resuming cross-border passenger service between Chicago and Toronto. The initial plans called for a 2027 startup of service, pending the appropriate customs procedures are in place and track upgrades between the Michigan Central rail tunnel beneath the Detroit River and Walkerville Station. At one point, Via and Amtrak enjoyed popular demand for their service between Chicago and Toronto. I rode the Amtrak from Sarnia to Kitchener once, when I went to visit my sister at university. It was the only time I rode a Superliner.

It will be interesting to see if international passenger service could resume, as this service once enjoyed great success. Windsor Station still boats steady business. It is one of Via's busiest stations, given its multiple trains going to and from Toronto each day.

In a way, it would be a full circle moment for rail activity in the Walkerville neighbourhood. It's not as if things are necessarily quiet, but they are certainly not what they once were. Maybe some international rail service could spur additional rail investment in this historic part of Canada's rail network.

My railway happy place

I’m tired. Tired from renovating my basement after a flood and tired of rehabilitating my property after we had a new pipe connected to our house, which destroyed our front yard and landscaping. So yeah, I’m tired from that. I’m also tired of this wet spring and cool temperatures. This spring has not been great and much of my time has been spent as a cut-rate Mike Holmes wannabe.

So the blog has suffered a bit. I was thinking of new things to talk about and there is no shortage of newsworthy items from Ottawa. Our new LRT is still not ready and doesn’t appear to be, even though it is more than a year behind schedule. Did I mention that one of the new electric trainsets derailed just outside of Belfast Yard recently? Okay, maybe this topic is not your cup of tea. How about the uncertainty over CN’s desire to pull out of Ottawa? How about CN’s recent (and vague) advertisements alluding to some sort of celebration they are organizing for Ottawa next year? I’m wondering if they’re even going to be here still.

I am not going to write about any of this. I’m bored with reality, tired of light rail and full up with day-to-day headaches. I want to think back to when I was young and just liked watching trains go by; a time when I simply admired them for the mechanical marvels that they are.

With that in mind, here are a few small anecdotes and observations from the railway of my youth, CSX’s Sarnia Subdivision. In many ways, this rail line is an anomaly that you don’t often find anymore. I was looking through some photographs of this line the other day when I noticed some interesting things that I hadn’t seen before.

1. In this shot, can you see the old telegraph pole? I never noticed it before and with good reason. They are pretty small, compared to the old poles I’ve noticed along other rights-of-way. Just a single pole and two measly wires leaning away from the roadbed.

As readers of this blog know, this line is actually quite old. It has changed hands a number of times and reads like a who’s who of CSX predecessors. It was the Erie and Huron Railway when it opened for business in 1886. It changed hands once and was renamed before becoming part of the Pere Marquette Railway in 1902. From there, it became part of the Chesapeake and Ohio in 1947, and then the inevitable mergers brought in the Chessie System group of companies before finally becoming CSX Transportation.

Unlike many other railways, this line shed its passenger service in 1933, much earlier than other lines. It’s a shame that none of the passenger stations have survived, other than the old Mooretown Station, which is located on the grounds of the Moore Museum.

But that little telegraph pole, barely noticeable as it is at the back of my sister’s property, which extends to the tracks, is a witness to the history of this line and its importance in connecting a very large and scattered group of settlements in Lambton County.

2. This is something I’ve noticed before but it was particularly noticeable behind my sister’s house. Usually, a railway’s roadbed is elevated a fair bit above the surrounding landscape for many reasons, not the least of which is to prevent washouts from floods. In many areas along this line, the roadbed is actually not elevated all that much higher than the surrounding area. I really noticed it in these images. It made me wonder if this was a factor of neglect in that the railway has not bothered to bolster its ballast in a while or if it was a factor of the line’s design. Did the elevation in this area suggest to the line's builders that it did not require that much of an elevation? I wonder.

3. I’ve shared this shot before, but I like the fact that this line still has concrete mileposts, like this one near Emily Street in Mooretown. I’m not sure how many are actually left but I like the fact that some of them are still around. I recall as a kid seeing concrete W signs as well, but as you can tell from this shot below, some of them have been replaced over the years.

4. I didn’t realize this until I was older, but this rail line has no speed or occupancy signals, and for good reason. The line, even in its heyday, connected with CN in Sarnia and CP in Chatham. The trackage through Chatham-Kent is now finished, of course, and the Sarnia connection is used only for once-a-day interchanges between CSX and CN at CN’s Sarnia Yard. CSX also connects with CN’s St. Clair River Industrial Spur at Terra Industries, south of Courtright, but this connection seems to be lightly used or unused at the moment. The point is, neither of these current connections require signals. The Chatham connection did have signals but I think that was it for this line. Up until the 1950s, the line also connected with the former Canada Southern St. Clair Branch in Courtright, but I have not seen any images of whether it was governed by any signals. A real throwback. I imagine the line was (and still is?) governed by OCS.

5. One more way this line was really different. I remember watching a competitive baseball tournament one summer when I was young and then hearing the rumbling of a GP38 (like this one pictured) on the adjacent rail line (this line in my day was the exclusive domain of this geep). Well, didn’t the engineer stop the engine next to the ball field so he could watch some of the action? How many rail lines have this type of casual attitude these days? It reminds me that numerous blog readers have told me that they see CN 589 stop at the March Road railway crossing in Kanata so the crew can pick up a Tim Hortons coffee on their way to Arnprior.

You know, I feel better now. It’s been a tough couple of weeks of hard work for me. And my commute to work has been changed by bridge closures, due to flooding. So, not a lot to cheer about, but I have plans to have a trackside day in the coming weeks. This was the same trackside day I planned a year ago. So, things are looking up.

What about you, fair reader? Where is your railway happy place? Or where was it?

Ontario Hydro and CSX: The railway deal that wasn't

I stumbled across a photo the other day of a CSX train passing by the Lambton Generating Station near Courtright, Ont. The photo reminded me of a rail story about this old coal-fired generating station, where I spent a summer working. The photo caption suggested that two rail spurs into the generating station property were used for coal deliveries and fly ash removal. Though the photo was top notch, the information about the rail spur was wrong. I know this because my Dad worked at this power station and I know the story behind the rails into that plant.

So, here is the story behind these long disconnected rail spurs and how they nearly led to a deal between Ontario Hydro and CSX Transportation in the 1990s, a deal that would have changed the fortunes of the rail line.

Could a deal with Ontario Hydro have changed the fortunes of the CSX Sarnia Subdivision in the 1990s? We'll never know. (Stalled northbound freight near Corunna in 1991)

I spoke with my Dad about the rail lines recently and he told me the two rail spurs into the powerhouse (the main building, left of photo) and behind the powerhouse were put in place to deliver the materials needed to build the power plant in the mid-1960s. At the time, the railway delivering those materials was the Chesapeake and Ohio.

Here's a closer shot, below, of the rails without the mark-ups.  You will notice to the right of the photograph that part of the turnout from the Sarnia Subdivision was preserved but a section of track was torn out. This remained the case for decades after the rail deliveries stopped when the plant was built. I find it interesting that these rails remained in place. Was there a thought that these rails would someday be useful again?

In the late 1990s, I was fortunate enough to land a summer job at the Lambton Generating Station, which was perhaps the best summer job I have ever had. I recall walking through the powerhouse and seeing those old rails in place. I wondered then why they were there. It wasn't until recently that my Dad told me about the rails being in place for the construction. The scale of the construction must have been impressive, if the rails were put in place simply to deliver materials for the power plant. Sadly, no publicly available photographs exist of the railway delivering any of these pieces necessary to build the plant.

That brings me back to the early 1990s when the Lambton Generating Station was being retrofitted with scrubbing technology that used lime to remove harmful sulphur dioxide emissions from the generating process. The thought at the time was that the best way to deliver the lime needed was to have it brought in by train. The resulting fly ash that was produced by the scrubbing process would have been shipped out by rail as well. This would have been a pretty big contract for CSX Transportation, which was struggling at this point with the loss of industry on its Sarnia Subdivision.

From a railfanning perspective, I don't think this deal would have changed the look of trains on the Sarnia Subdivision. I would imagine you would have seen more of these covered hoppers in the Courtright area, not that these cars were uncommon along that line at the time.

Alas, it was not to be. At one point, it was decided that rail service was too expensive and that all the lime would be brought in by truck and all the fly ash removed the same way. I have to wonder just how expensive it would have been for a Crown corporation to back away from rail service. After all, Ontario Hydro (later Ontario Power Generation) wasn't exactly the model of cost efficiency.

That leaves me with one shot from my summer at the plant. This is a shot my Dad took of me standing atop one of the power generation units at the top of the powerhouse.  You can see a Canada Steamship Lines coal ship making its way south along the St. Clair River to the left of me. The power plant received its coal from these lake freighters. You can see the coal funnel just to my left in the photo.

I climbed up to the roof of the plant with my Dad on one of my last days of work.

My most vivid memory of that climb to the top of the power station was walking up this long set of metal stairs. The higher we went, the deeper the dark void was beneath us in the unit we were climbing. My dad breezed up the stairs like it was nothing, but I was hanging on to the rails and taking each step gingerly. Man, what  bad time to discover a fear of heights.

Anyway, the rail deal never happened and thus started an endless convoy of trucks in and out of the Lambton Generating Station to feed its scrubbers. It would have been fun to see rail service in that facility, but CSX never had the chance to use those rails again. Looking at the overhead shots of the rails in that area, I wonder if they might be of use again when a new gas-fired power plant is built on the property to replace the controversial Mississauga gas plant that was shuttered before it was completed. I doubt those rails would be of use, since the new plant will not be built near the old powerhouse. However, it is worth noting that two of the units in the old powerhouse have been kept in a condition such that they can be started again if there is a retrofit considered for the old plant.

I guess keeping those rails in place all these decades might not have been such a bad idea.