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?

Looking for some railway history

Chances are, you can take just about any town in Canada without rails and find some sort of railway influence in its past. Even now, in communities where railways still pass through, you will likely find a much more extensive railway past.

This year, I hope to dig up some more rail history as part of my meanderings here on the blog. In the coming months, I am hoping to share some photos and thoughts about some historic railway towns here in the Ottawa Valley. I am hoping that some of my blog's readers who live in the Ottawa area can make some suggestions for some piece of local rail history they would like to see me approach.

As an example, I am putting together a post about Almonte, which is a beautiful town west of Ottawa that was once served by the Canadian Pacific's Chalk River Sub. I am proud to say I have witnessed action along this old rail line in Almonte.

With that in mind, I thought I'd share some interesting photos that will kick off Beachburg Sub's Year of Rail History. Since this year marks Canada's 150th birthday, I think it's only fitting that we take a couple looks back and celebrate our history.

This photo above is a shot of Mooretown's old Pere Marquette railway station, which was saved for the museum after it was moved from its spot on the St. Clair Parkway where it was used as a private home. The station itself was sold off for use as a home when it was deemed redundant to the railway at some point. In 1988, the family living in the old station moved to a larger home so the station was moved to the Moore Museum grounds, just down the road from the tracks.

Of course, Mooretown's train station is a success story. Some locals obviously felt the old station should have been saved, so they loaded it onto a large trailer and brought it from its spot on the river and to the museum. The image above is from the Moore Museum. It was sent to me by a reader, but I don't know much about the circumstances of the move. This is only one of two stations to survive along this old rail line, the other being the Dresden station.

Of course, many other buildings on the Sarnia Subdivision were not so lucky. For a time, CSX kept a trackside shed in Port Lambton, which bore the town name. That trackside structure was sold to a local resident and used in the family's back yard as a shed.

The other day, I saw a larger shot of this timetable on one of my Facebook railway groups, which began to get me thinking about history.

As you can see, there were once eight passenger trains plying the Sarnia Subdivision. This is not surprising, since railways were the main mode of transportation between towns before cars became the dominant mode of personal transportation.

But what I found interesting is how many stops these passenger trains made. For example, in my hometown, Corunna, you had four trains a day, two northbound and two southbound. I am determined to find out more about passenger service on this line, particularly when it ended. I am guessing it was discontinued shortly after the Second World War, but it may have been sooner.

My hometown is a place with almost no visual history remaining. There are possibly two or three Confederation era homes left in the town and one church, built in 1862, but that's it. The rest of the town appears as if it was thrown together after the 1960s. I would love to find out more information about my hometown's train station. This timetable is the first document I have seen that proves there was some sort of passenger station (or possibly shack) in Corunna.

Closer to my current home, I recently uncovered two references to two railway stations in Bells Corners. I am pretty sure the old CN station was located behind the fence in this picture, where Northside Road meets Cassidy Road (Cassidy Road used to be part of Cedarview Road).Sadly, it was not saved. In fact, Ottawa had many more stations scattered around the city but none were saved, except the old Union Station downtown.

I also read a reference to the other Bells Corners railway station, which was located along the old Canadian Pacific Carleton Place Sub (now a recreational trail) along what is now known as Fitzgerald Road. I wasn't able to find anything more specific as to where the station was. What makes this task so tough is that there is very little online about the history of Bells Corners (same problem with Corunna).

This is a shot of the old Carleton Place Sub. The station would have been located somewhere on the right side of the trail. My goal this year is to try and find out where the old station was located.

So, that is my mission for this year. I welcome any suggestions from anyone out there as to what they might want me to research. Hopefully, we can shine a light on some long forgotten railway relics this year.

Chessie System's last stand in Ontario

Growing up just south of Sarnia, Ont., I watched the famous railway cat Chessie breeze through my hometown along CSX Transportation's Sarnia Subdivision. The line was an oddity by most standards, although I wasn't old enough to appreciate it. The most obvious oddity was the ongoing use of Chessie System-painted locomotives well into the 1990s. The Chessie livery lived on elsewhere in the CSX network long after the Chessie-Seaboard System merger, but the cat seemed to persist much longer on the Sarnia Sub.

                              GP-38 2002 crosses St. Clair Boulevard in Corunna, Ont., Spring 1991

No doubt these units were left in the Chessie livery as a cost-saving measure. At one point, the sides of the cabs were repainted to with the CSXT reporting mark instead of C&O, B&O or WM identifiers, which the Chessie System used on its units after the Baltimore and Ohio, Chesapeake and Ohio and Western Maryland railways were brought together under the Chessie System umbrella. When I was growing up, I used to think the Chessie colours were something akin to the old Houston Astros uniforms. In other words, I thought they were gaudy and downright ugly.

Looking back, I'm glad I took photos of those units, which were usually paired off in twos. The Chessie geeps shuttled tank cars, hopper cars, auto racks and boxcars to and from Chatham, Ont. and Sarnia, Ont. The frequency of the trains was low, with one heading in each direction once a day and sometimes two at most. The density of traffic on this single track line was light enough that there was no signal equipment on much of the right-of-way.

Besides the Chessie engines, the line also featured a number of other throwbacks like two types of cabooses that were in use well into the 1990s, long after most cabooses went the way of the dodo. There were also several pre-World War II wooden boxcars and crew cars lingering on the line into the 1990s. Perhaps the most interesting relic was a Baltimore and Ohio-painted GP-38 that was used on the line during this time. More on all of these in future posts.

The Sarnia sub is still operational today. The line meets up with the Canadian Pacific's Windsor mainline in Chatham. It once ventured all the way south to Rondeau Point on Lake Erie before that section was abandoned all the way up to Blenheim. A small section in Blenheim was sold to CN and remains in service. At the north end, the Sarnia sub finishes in the Chemical Valley, where it interchanges with the Canadian National.

The line was completed in 1886 as the Erie and Huron Railroad. In 1902-03, it became part of the Pere Marquette system, which itself became part of the Chesapeake and Ohio in 1947. The line once carried passengers, as evidenced by this former passenger station near the end of line in Sarnia (left). This station is hidden behind a refinery in the Chemical Valley at the end of Clifford Street. The old station acted as a railway office for years. I haven't been by there recently, so I have no idea what has become of this sad old building.

There isn't much else along this line that serves as a reminder of its past. However, south of Sarnia in the riverfront community of Mooretown, the old railway station has been preserved along with a speeder on the grounds of the Moore Museum (below).

Although this sub continues to operate sporadically, there has been chatter for years that CSX wants to abandon this line. If it does, it would mark the end of the railway's presence in Ontario. CSX still has trackage rights in Windsor and a branch in New York State that stretches up to Melocheville, Que. Other than that, the Chessie cat has all but disappeared in Canada, as you can see on the CSX system map.

I guess age changes your perspective because I don't find the old Chessie colours so bad anymore. I was lucky to have caught up with the Houston Astros of the railway scene and grabbed a few images like this one when I had the chance (below).

                            Two geeps sit idle just outside Corunna with a full load headed to Sarnia
                            and the Chemical Valley (April 91). Since the sub is a single track
                            with no major sidings, it was not uncommon for freights to stop on the line
                            while waiting for switch jobs to clear the main track. 

NOTE: If you are new to the Beachburg Sub, I would invite you to read the first post to get a primer for this blog.