Toronto's Historical Plaques

at torontoplaques.com

Learn a little of Toronto's history as told through its plaques

The John Street Roundhouse

Photo by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted June, 2011

Photo by Alan L Brown - Posted November, 2011

In Roundhouse Park on the southwest corner of Lower Simcoe Street and Bremner Boulevard, across the street from the CN Tower and the Rogers Centre, is this City of Toronto plaque with a location map on the other side. Here's what it tells us:

Plaque coordinates: 43.64144 -79.38647

You are now standing in the middle of what was once the Toronto Locomotive and Car Facilities of the Canadian Pacific Railway. These facilities were built in 1929 to service the 75 CPR passenger trains a day that utilized the new Union Station. Railroaders called this complex John Street, after the thoroughfare that once extended south of the tracks over a bridge. In its prime, John Street included 43 structures, several kilometres of track and 6.5 ha of property that stretched as far as Bay Street. The facilities were busiest during the 1940s and 50s, until the CPR replaced steam locomotives with diesels, a process that was complete by 1960. John Street continued to service passenger cars and diesel locomotives until 1982. In 1988 the roundhouse was closed and turned over to the City of Toronto for redevelopment as the Toronto Railway Heritage Centre. A series of interpretive plaques explaining the history of this unique National Historic Site will guide you through Roundhouse Park and help you appreciate Toronto's fascinating railway heritage.

Below are the 11 interpretive plaques
shown in the map above and mentioned in the text above.

John Street Roundhouse The Railroad Lands

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted June, 2011

Photo Source - City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1231, f1231_it0955

The John Street roundhouse was once part of a vast complex of railroad facilities that extended 3 km from Strachan Avenue to Yonge Street and became known as the Railroad Lands. When the railroads first entered Toronto in the 1850s, there wasn't enough available property for their installations, so they created new land by filling in the harbour south from the original shoreline near Front Street. This process continued until the 1920s, when the harbour assumed its present configuration. In the 1960s, the railroads shifted their freight yards and locomotive facilities to the suburbs.

Canadian Pacific's John Street and Canadian National's Spadina facilities continued to be used for the servicing of passenger trains until the 1980s, when Via Rail moved that function to Mimico, 8 km to the west. By this time, the Railroad Lands had become the most valuable real estate in Canada and CN's Spadina roundhouse was demolished to make way for Skydome. Many of Toronto's best-known landmarks occupy property that was once used for railroad purposes, including Roy Thomson Hall, the CBC Broadcast Centre, the CN Tower and the Air Canada Centre.

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted June, 2011

John Street was one of the largest passenger car maintenance facilities in the vast Canadian Pacific Railroad system. The coach yards could hold 450 passenger cars, each over 24 m in length. Coupled together, these would comprise a train more than 11 km long.

When John Street opened in 1929, there were dozens of different types of passenger cars. These included baggage cars, coaches, colonist cars for immigrants, and tourist sleeping cars, one of which, Jackman, is in the Toronto Railroad Heritage Centre (TRHC) collection. First class equipment provided an even wider variety of configurations that included parlor cars with individual seating; dining cars that featured full restaurant service; and sleeping cars with several different arrangements priced according to size. There were also observation cars with rear porches and lounge cars that featured various luxurious amenities, such as the solarium-lounge car Cape Race, also in the TRHC collection.

The cars on many of the CPR's most prestigious trains were cleaned, provisioned, maintained and repaired here. These trains included the Dominion, the Canadian, and the Trans-Canada Limited, an all-sleeping car train that was reserved exclusively for first class passengers. The northern coach yard was the first part of John Street to be redeveloped in the 1970s to make way for the CN Tower.

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted June, 2011

Photo by Alan L Brown - Posted September, 2007

Photo Source - Wikimedia Commons

Built between 1915 and 1930, and officially opened by the Prince of Wales in 1927, the magnificent Beaux-Arts Union Station with its spectacular Great Hall is one of Toronto's most cherished architectural landmarks and is the reason that the John Street facilities were built in 1929. The current structure is actually the fourth Union Station; the first three served from 1858 to 1927 and were located between Simcoe and York streets.

Union Station was built primarily as an intercity rail terminal and today over half of Via Rail's passengers pass through the facility. In 1967 the station began to evolve into a commuter hub for Toronto's ever-expanding GO Transit regional rail service. Along with the roundhouse, Union Station is a National Historic Site now owned by the City of Toronto. In 2010, the City began a $640 million revitalization of the station that will transform it into a 21st century rail terminal while restoring and preserving its heritage elements. Union Station is the busiest transportation terminal in Canada with 200,000 people and 240 trains every weekday.

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted June, 2011

When the first passenger train began operating in Toronto in 1853, steam locomotives burned wood for fuel. By the 1870s, coal became the primary fuel and remained so until the end of the steam era in the 1950s. The CPR described this tower as a 355 t circular bin mechanical coaling plant. Coal was a cheap and efficient fuel, but it was dirty and emitted much pollution. Most of the coal used by Toronto's railroads was imported from the United States. Rail cars known as hoppers brought the coal to the yards, locomotive servicing facilities and division points where it was stored in structures like this. The coal was hoisted to the top of the tower by conveyer buckets. The locomotive was then positioned underneath and gravity fed the coal into the tender, which could accommodate between 8 and 14 t. Sand was also stored in the tower for locomotive traction on grades and icy or wet rail. The sand was dried by stoves and filtered before it was piped by compressed air into the tower. This structure was originally located 183 m to the east near Bremner Blvd. and Lower Simcoe St. In 1995, construction of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre required that the tower be relocated, one of the heaviest single objects ever moved in Canada.

Related websites
steam locomotive
coal
coaling tower
hopper car

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted June, 2011

Photo Source - Wikimedia Commons

Roundhouses were unique circular buildings used to inspect, clean and repair a steam locomotive at the end of an operating cycle and make it ready for the next trip. At one time there were more than 3,000 roundhouses in North America; today fewer than 200 remain. The first Canadian Pacific roundhouse on this site was built at a lower elevation in 1897. By the 1920s a completely updated facility was required to complement the new Union Station. The John Street roundhouse was built by the Anglin-Norcross Company and opened in October 1929. On the west side of the roundhouse is the machine shop annex used to house power-driven machinery for locomotive repairs.

John Street employed the innovative Direct Steaming Process whereby the steam used to move the locomotives was pumped directly into the engines from the Central Heating Plant at the foot of York Street. Since there was no fire raging in the boiler, this reduced pollution and created a more pleasant work environment for employees. Following the retirement of steam locomotives in 1960, the roundhouse was used exclusively for diesels, except in the 1970s when three steam locomotives were restored here for excursion service. The CPR closed the roundhouse in 1986 and it was declared a National Historic Site in 1990. The Toronto Railroad Heritage Centre occupies stalls 15, 16 & 17 and the machine shop.

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted June, 2011

Photo Source - Wikimedia Commons

A circular building with radial tracks was the most efficient way to maximize the number of locomotives under cover in a given space. Steam locomotives were usually operated in one direction only and turntables provided a compact and efficient means to turn them around. This turntable was built by the Canadian Bridge Company of Walkerville, Ontario, in 1929. It is a twin-span, three-point turntable that pivots on a central axis. The weight of the locomotive is supported in the centre and at both ends on trucks that ride on a circular rail extending the circumference of the reinforced concrete pit. An air motor at each end propels the turntable by compressed air pumped up from an underground generator. At 36 m, the John Street turntable is one of the longest ever built in Canada and was sufficient to accommodate the largest steam locomotives used by Canadian Pacific in Toronto passenger service. These were two 4-8-4 Northerns built by the CPR's Angus Shops in 1928 and used to haul overnight passenger trains between Toronto and Montreal until 1954. In the 1990s, the Metro Toronto Convention Centre was built underneath what is now Roundhouse Park and the turntable was dismantled and stored in the roundhouse until 2007 when it was moved to Barrie and restored by Western Mechanical.

John Street Roundhouse Workers of John Street

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted June, 2011

Roundhouses allowed the railroads to centralize the skilled labour and machinery necessary to clean, fuel and maintain locomotives. Steam locomotives were far more labour intensive than today's modern diesel engines and hundreds of workers were employed at John Street and worked 24 hours a day during the steam era. Although the work could be uncomfortable, strenuous, dirty, and sometimes dangerous, skilled trade railroad jobs were prestigious and well paid. Since this roundhouse had excellent external lighting provided by large clerestory windows and employed the Direct Steaming Process, the greatly improved air quality and visibility in the roundhouse provided a much cleaner working environment than most roundhouses, with their badly polluted air and poor visibility. Those who worked at John Street included skilled tradesmen such as boilermakers, blacksmiths, pipefitters, electricians, machinists and carpenters. Apprentices worked under the tradesmen while they spent years undergoing training and writing examinations in order to obtain certification. Semi-skilled employees were engine wipers, engine cleaners, ash-pit men, light-up men, labourers and trimmers. The locomotives serviced here were so attractively maintained that their appearance became known among railroaders as the "John Street polish."

Related websites
roundhouse
steam locomotive
clerestory windows

John Street Roundhouse Watchman's Shanty

Photos by contributor Derek Boles - Posted November, 2011

This small building is typical of those that provided shelter for the gate tenders or watchmen who guarded the numerous grade crossings where city streets intersected with railroad tracks. In an era before electronic signals and automatic crossing gates, the watchman manually lowered the gates whenever a train approached, preventing vehicles and pedestrians from approaching the tracks until the train had passed. The men who were employed in this service were often railroaders who had been injured on the job and reassigned to a task requiring less physical dexterity. Many of these shanties were mounted on a tower 5 m above the ground and the ample windows provided a clear view in all directions.

This shanty would have been originally fitted with a stove and a bench, and for many years was located where the lead tracks for the CPR King Street freight yard crossed over John Street. As the frequency of trains multiplied, level crossings at busy streets became increasingly dangerous, and grade separated crossings or underpasses were built to carry railroad tracks above the city streets. The first of these opened along Queen Street West in 1885. Early in the 20th century, several expensive grade separations were built throughout the city, culminating in the Union Station viaduct that opened in 1930.

Related website
Union Station

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted June, 2011

Cabin D was an interlocking tower built by the Grand Trunk Railroad in the 1890s. It was one of five towers lettered from A to E that controlled the signal lights and track switches around Union Station. The tower was originally located along the mainline rail corridor at the junction west of Bathurst Street where several railroad tracks diverged. In 1931, Cabins A, B & C were replaced by more modern structures while Cabin D remained in place. This tower was unusual in that its control of the track switches was not electro-mechanical as it was in the newer towers.

Cabin D employed switch tenders, personnel who scurried around the tracks near the Bathurst Street bridge and manually positioned the track switches according to directions broadcast by loudspeaker from the tower. This anachronistic operation remained in place until the 1980s, when the rapidly expanding GO Transit service created a rail traffic bottleneck that caused significant delays for commuters. A rail underpass known as the flyunder, located between Spadina Avenue and Bathurst Street, alleviated the problem and opened in 1983. Cabin D was then retired and moved to the roundhouse.

Related websites
Grand Trunk Railroad
GO Transit

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted June, 2011

Photo Source - Wikimedia Commons

The Don station was built by the Canadian Pacific Railroad in 1896 and was originally located south of Queen Street on the west side of the Don River. The station was a convenience for passengers living in Toronto's rapidly expanding east end so they didn't have to travel all the way downtown to Union Station to purchase tickets or board trains. Beginning in 1906, Don also served passengers of the Canadian Northern Railroad, which later became part of the Canadian National Railroads. During World War I, several troop trains carrying members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force originated at Don. In the 1920s, over twenty passenger trains stopped at Don every day, including the CPR's most important trains for Ottawa and Montreal. Following the opening of the new Union Station in 1927, Don declined in importance although it remained a train order station for crews of both CPR and CNR passenger and freight trains. Don was closed in 1967 and was moved to Todmorden Mills in 1969, where it remained for four decades until it was relocated to Roundhouse Park in 2008 and restored by Murison Restoration.

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted June, 2011

The steam locomotives serviced at John Street required vast quantities of water, which was pumped in from Lake Ontario and stored in this 227 125 L tower. The height of the tower provided sufficient gravity so that the water could flow through underground piping into standpipes, vertical columns with a rotating spout and a control valve that fed the water into the tenders of the locomotives. There were four of these standpipes strategically placed around the engine terminal, two behind you, one at Simcoe Street and the other at Bay Street.

The fire generated by burning coal in the boiler of the locomotive would heat the water to the boiling point, generating the steam energy required to propel the train, heat the passenger cars, pump enough air to operate all the brakes on the train, and blow the distinctive whistle that characterized the railroad age of steam. In an era long before the concept of conserving natural resources was familiar to most people, Canadian Pacific recycled the hot water that was used to wash out the locomotive boilers by conserving it in a large tank in the machine shop and then circulating it back into the locomotives without it having to be completely reheated.

Related websites
steam locomotives
whistle
boiler

More
Transportation

Here are the visitors' comments for this page.

Posted April 1, 2012
Absolutely marvellous photos. Thank You. I have taken some photos of Spadina roundhouse, now on the web but unfortunately none of John Street, as I was just moderately interested in the rail in those days. Your photos helped me a lot with some research that I will undertake, followed by a visit.
Massey F. Jones, Calgary

Here's where you can write a comment for this page.

Note: If you wish to ask me a question, please use the email link in the menu.

Note: Comments are moderated. Yours will appear on this page within 24 hours
(usually much sooner).