Ghosts of Raillines Past - CNoR / Taylor Creek

Earlier in the summer I was doing some surfing for information on the old Canadian Northern Railway.  This was mainly inspired by the recent conversion of the CNoR locomotive works building in Leaside into a Longos grocery store.  It's a pretty cool looking building if you haven't seen it yet, both inside and out.  It's hard to imagine that this century old structure was used to service railway engines of the day.  Despite the loss of CNoR and it's ultimate encapsulation into today's Canadian National Railway, the building survived under a few different industries until sitting idle behind a group of buildings along Laird Avenue.  Most people (me included) never laid eyes on the structure until some businesses along Laird were removed, exposing the building's facade to passing traffic.

Along the way I found this site with images from the Global TV helicopter  showing a series of overhead views of the east Toronto area and a few key images of East York.  I was guided to the site by a hit on one of the comments regarding the second image showing Taylor Creek.  Taylor Creek is my bread and butter for running since it's literally steps away from my house.  I run the higher south side trail frequently, known to a few as the Taylor Creek harrier circuit, since it's soft and fairly flat for the most part albeit a bit swampy in places.

This image on the site shows Taylor Creek (the image is captioned Looking northwest up Glen Stuart Ravine on the page) along the section east of the baseball diamonds in Stan Wadlow park.  If you look along the left side of the valley you will see a long straight line leading up to the diamonds.  From there it veers a bit left and continues on towards the lower Don Valley at Don Mills Road.  This was part of the CNoR Toronto-Ottawa railline.  I've often thought this had to have been a railline at some point given the sheer straightness of this mainly level trail.

Hard to pass up an opportunity to explore a railline that once passed only a few hundred meters away from my house.  With that, it was doing some searching of maps, aerial images and whatever I could find, wait for the leaves to fall away, then go on a hunt.

It starts with a whopping 3 minute jog down hill to the base of Haldon Avenue.  Standing on Haldon in line, the ROW would be roughly where the hydro lines are.

 Following the line of the eastbound trail the rails would have passed through where the roadway ends and the parking lot begins.  Hydro One towers run the full length of the trail in both directions.

Utility poles just north of the pathway on the east section may be the current incarnations of those used by the CNoR at the time, being reused and replaced over the years.  Previously the poles used to terminate at a hydro substation just beyond the parking lot.

Further east is much the same until you reach a hydro station past Main Avenue.  From Google aerial maps you can see the line stretching through the valley and detect the segment between Dawes Road and Victoria Park Avenue just south of Massey Square and continue on to what is now the TTC line out of Vic Park station.

Returning back to Haldon Avenue, growth makes the immediate west part inaccessible for a bit

and today it's a slightly muddy climb under the O'Connor bridge to connect back to the ROW area.

The trail runs high on the north side of the ROW and you can see where the railbed would have existed lower on the south side.

 It's pretty swampy down there and must have presented some challenges in keeping the railbed dry and intact.  As you progress westward you descend a sharp hill and soon are back onto the old ROW.

It also gets pretty swampy on some of the higher parts of the old right-of-way.

At the northwest end of the trail, the ROW would have crossed part of what is now a parking lot and extended into the web of on and off ramps around the DVP and Don Mills Road.  Anything that existed along there is long gone with major regrading and reworking for the DVP.
Next is looking up archival aerial views on the City of Toronto  Archives site.  These particular images are from 1942, well after the rails were pulled up but the right-of-way can be easily seen.  You will need an SID reader for the files downloaded from the archive site.  Compare it to either Google maps or Bing maps, you can see that Don Mills Road was the same as it is now along with the sections of O'Connor Drive that form it's southern terminus.  Also pretty well intact is the Bala sub ROW.  The river itself has been rerouted to accomodate the DVP in some sections although you can see that the short curved section of the river that approaches the CN lines is still the same in the area where the CNoR line would have connected up.

From this aerial image, you can see the ROW extending from the Bala line to the river and what looks like supports for the bridge structure:

Here is the same location on Google, the image is a couple of years out of date:

The orientation of the images is slightly different.  The Google map has north directly up while the aerial image from 1942 has north a little to the right, more in line with the orientation of the street grid pattern.  There's a whitish section in the water that looks the same in both images and lines up with the rail ROW.

On Sunday, with warm temperatures and growth dying off, I was able to climb around the area of the hydro tower that appears near the center of the Google image above.  Directly adjacent to the hydro tower is this structure covered in weeds and vines:

It sure looks like a bridge support to me.  In the 1942 image there's several industrial buildings just south of this spot but they don't appear to be where this structure lies.

On the opposite side of the river is the large angular whitish object that appears in the water in both the 1942 image and the Google image.  It's just a rocky outcropping that's accessible from a trail that runs on the north side of the river.

This is the same outcropping from the other side:

I poked around but could find no sign of any bridge structure.  The overgrowth is very heavy though:

What is obvious on the other side is the raised railbed built up to level the tracks for merging:

When you stand here, you can see the bed leading from where the bridge abutment would have been and it's path into the Bala tracks.

So, not much of this line remains beyond this bridge structure, the level graded areas in the valley, the raised railbed areas and the legacy of the utility poles east of Haldon Avenue.  It's still fascinating to think of a steamer chugging it's way delicately through Taylor Creek on it's way east, or back.

Ghosts of Raillines Past - The GECO / Kingston Extension

I saw a post somewhere that made mention of trains passing by the old Hy & Zel's in Warden Woods Mall and it sparked a memory for me at the same location. I remember sitting in the parking lot as a train headed south, my wife headed into the mall and I stayed back to watch a short consist go by.  I now recognise this rail line as part of the GECO branch line.  This section was built to form a loop for local switch traffic in nearby yards, connecting back to the very busy Kingston line.  It was closed in 1996 and Hy& Zel's, together with the rest of Warden Woods Mall, is now history.

A few weeks back I traced the existing active section of the GECO branch from Comstock to the Uxbridge sub.  This weekend I followed the path of the removed section to see what would remain 16 years later.

With Google maps, the rail bed can be traced fairly easily and the in between reclaimed sections are easy to interpolate from it's satellite view.  On foot, it's not so easy.  I cached the satellite view on my phone, grabbed the Sony cam too, just in case I met some traffic on the active lines, and went off towards the southern connection point.

I wound my way south to along the Danforth then east to Danforth Road.  Near Warden, I could hear a short unit, maybe engine(s) only, heading along the Kingston line but wasn't yet in position to catch it.  A bit later I found Milne Avenue near where the spur connected up with the Kingston line tracks.  An industrial building occupied the section just north of the switch and I wasn't about to enter to see if I could spot any remnant of the switch bed, with 'private property' sounds in abundance.

Edit: I found this image on Railpictures.ca from June, 1983. On the right side of the image is the building shown above. Note the railway crossing signal where the extension would have passed near the building. The first indication of the line is an asphalt patch on Milne Avenue left behind after rail removal.

At the north end of the patch is a short metal barrier added to prevent road traffic from accessing the road level bed.

The path of the rail bed is quite obvious here as it parallels Milne Avenue.  When you stand at this point you can see the path of the former railbed through the entire section.

It the crosses Mack Avenue with a similar patch in the asphalt.  At both former crossings can be seen the painted 'X' warnings on the roadway, this despite maybe 20+ years of wear.

North of Mack the patch guides the railbed into a dome shaped storage building.

With the path leading into closed industrial property, I was forced to head west and looped around to find the crossing point on Danforth Road.  Here, I had to resort to my cached map on my phone as finding the location was essentially impossible visually.  There was no sign of any former crossings, likely the roadway had since been resurfaced.  The only indication of the former line was the curvature of the property lines of the nearby buildings indicating they abutted to the right-of-way.

Maybe this road patch was part of the crossing, but I doubt it.  My maps indicated it was very close to the correct location but it didn`t seem to completely cross the road.  However, it`s possible that more patching simply fooled me.  Very difficult to say.  This lead to a roadway into a new housing development.  I followed the road until it was blocked and exited to some new but existing housing at Oates Drive

After running through a park north of Oates and passing a couple of standing water overflow ponds, I was now on Bell Estate Rd., a section thoroughly regraded and any hint of the former rail bed is long since removed.  Back to Warden I headed north.  A multi-business complex had an access area towards the back just south of a Hydro One station.  The area of the rail bed is somewhat obvious here, if you knew what you  were looking at.

It`s recessed along the back fences of some older existing housing of Santamonica Boulevard (yes, that`s what it`s called).  You can detect the climb from further south as you get here so the recessed grading was necessary for rail traffic.

I had no intent to wind my way behind the Hydro One station so instead headed back to Warden and then north to St. Clair Avenue.

At St. Clair, a trio of railway bridges cross overhead.

The western two bridges are for TTC line traffic.  The eastern bridge serviced this GECO branch section.

Climbing some stairs to Santamonica Blvd off St. Clair, you can cross along a field to track level and see the top of the bridge.

The rail ties are still in place, but no rail.  There still exists `no tresspassing' signs so it may still technically be trespassing to step onto the bridge, so I didn`t.  The TTC tracks into Warden Station are adjacent to the west side.

Back along the field, you can see more ties where the rails used to reside.  A TTC train is seen exiting Warden Station.

Southward, the rail bed disappears into the brush, heading on a downgrade.  I didn't venture down this way as the growth is pretty thick and leads back behind the Hydro One station.  I'd be interested to see how far the ties carry though without venturing too far, but not today.

While nothing large and mechanical may ever cross the GECO part of the bridge ever again, the other two bridges are perpetually active with TTC traffic, seen here as a TTC train crosses St. Clair.







I headed north through a park adjacent to the tracks, eventually returning to lower spur of the existing active GECO branch line extending from the Uxbridge subdivision.  This was seen in my previous GECO blog entry.

The immediate southern section has been regraded, making it impossible to locate any trace of the line.  A bit further south, adjacent to Pidgeon Street (clearly, they are running out of names for streets in T.O.), the line can be picked up through traces of right-of-way fencing and 'No Tresspassing' signage, the signs seemingly ludicrous given that nature has effectively reclaimed the entire area.

From Google maps, it does look traceable, although the late summer growth shown here makes naviging it next to impossible.  I may revisit this area sometime before next spring after the growth has died off and see what remains.

Of the whole spur section, the reminders of the track persist in the southern most section through the impact on the streets and housing.  The centre section is mostly reclaimed by industry and housing development.  In sections not regraded, the location of buildings and fencing hints at the CN ROW points.  Only in the nothern sections, especially around St. Clair Avenue, can the former railbed's infrastructure be seen and will likely be there for a very long time to come.

It was a fun run for a Saturday, about 90 minutes of running with an added hour for the shot taking.

Ghosts of Raillines Past - Leaside Spur

Last Saturday it was the still very much alive CN GECO branch line that I explored. This Saturday was spent on the converted rails-to-trails line once known as the Leaside Spur that extends from just north of Eglinton Avenue to it's former junction with CN's Bala Subivision a bit south of York Mills. This connection linked the Bala with CP's Belleville Subdivision into the Leaside Yard. Abandoned for many years, the land was sold to the city, the rails were lifted and replaced with a walking trail. This spring, most of it was cleared and paved over, all the way from the southern tip to Bond Park Avenue. North of Bond Park is a fairly new gravel layer with a heavy amount of overgrowth of vines and summer flora. The northern and southern most points are blocked by ROW fencing to the respective active rail lines. At the north end a casual path to a parking lot grants access to the trail while the south end just seems a dead end.

It took a little more than a half hour to reach Eglinton at Leslie through ET Seton Park. Google maps showed the closest entry point and Overland and a peruse of the properties while running echoed that find. At Overland, a center fenced circular section on the paved trail has a short pair of track rails embedded in concrete as a testimony to the history of the trail. The asphalt on the path still had that new car smell.


I headed south to see if there were any other useable entry points all the while looking for evidence of the rail line itself. About half way on the south leg, railway ties leading towards a short siding by a Canadian Tire warehouse is all I could find for evidence of railbed.

At the southern end, you can spot the ties for the connection to the CP line just beyond the rocks blocking the entry, but no rails over the ROW fencing.

No whistling on the trail, please.

Heading back north I found a no-whistle sign on the east side of the pathway. I assume blaring horn blasts were out of the question as well, given the close proximity of residential housing beside the line.

Further north, the trail crosses Lawrence Avenue with a tidy set of signals for pedestrians and bikes. The trail adheres tight to the rail bed in width, flatness and straightness, there's no mistaking that this used to be a railline.




At Bond Avenue, you find the paved portion of the trail ends with a dirt path up to a 100 year old railway bridge, complete with ROW fencing and railway ties. Apparently there's much talk of what to do with this bridge, some think it should be removed for easier access to the park while others feel it's of sufficient historical significance to keep. It is the only real remanant of the earliest history for this spur with it's original concrete struture and ties. The ROW fencing on the south east part makes you believe this is an active line as it blocks access to the bridge, yet the bridge surface is clearly pedestrian in nature, covered in pressure-treated planks.

North of Bond is coarse gravel, probably laid in preparation for more asphalt. It's heavily overgrown and I weave my way around vines and summer flowers as a follow onward. Baseball bats ring out from the Bond Park diamonds immediately to the east.

At the north end, a very worn looking flanger sign sits just outside of the ROW fence, the white dots are pretty well rusted away, but it's the last remnant of the railline that once ran through this section.

Over the fence, the rails of the Bala line head north under the bridge at York Mills and south along Bond Park.








I noticed that the track signals to the north were red. I took the short informal entrance on the west side into a parking lot behind a church and headed to York Mills. Shortly after I arrived, a CN work truck on the rails stopped at a switch just north of Y/M and did a short inspection. This was the only activity I'd see this day.

This was over an hour into the run. It was again getting hot out, so I headed back down the pathway to Overland, back into the valley and home for another Saturday 3 hour outing (2 hours of running and one of exploring).