Click on the image for a closer look!
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Derek Boles, TRHA's historian, publishes a daily posting on the Toronto Railway Heritage Yahoo Group List. These postings document major railway oriented events that happened on that day of the year. One of today's items is as follows:
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"February 28, 1986:
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The last official engine movement occurs at Canadian National's Spadina roundhouse as CN switcher No. 7729 moves CN GP7 No. 4803 to the Canadian Pacific John Street roundhouse. The Geep had been donated to the City of Toronto in 1984 to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the incorporation of Toronto. The Spadina roundhouse was subsequently demolished to make way for Skydome, now the Rogers Centre." .
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If you wish to read these daily postings from Derek, simply join the Toronto Railway Heritage Yahoo Group List by clicking here.
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Moving counter clockwise from the upper left, the images show:
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• #4803 in action on the road in Edmonton, Alberta in June of 1970 - Photograph by Richard Yaremko from the Helmut G. Osterman collection
• #4803 in residence at the CN Spadina Roundhouse on May 20, 1985 by John Vincent
  
• #4803 in residence at the John St. Roundhouse by Russ Milland
• #4803 below the CN Tower in Roundhouse Park by Russ Milland
• #4803 in Roundhouse Park in front of the CP Roundhouse by Russ Milland
• Close up of the cab of #4803 by Russ Milland
  

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Posting by Russ Milland; Pictures as attributed above
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Click on the image for a closer look!
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Derek Boles, TRHA's historian, publishes a daily posting on the Toronto Railway Heritage Yahoo Group List. These postings document major railway oriented events that happened on that day of the year. One of today's items is as follows:
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"February 27, 1960: The Locomotive Preservation Committee of the Upper Canada Railway Society visits the Canadian National Railway Spadina roundhouse for the purpose of choosing a steam locomotive suitable for preservation and presentation to the City of Toronto. The committee chose U-2-g 4-8-4 No. 6213 and it was presented to the city in August 1960. It was subsequently moved to the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) grounds, where it was mounted adjacent to the old Stanley Barracks, then being used as the Marine Museum of Upper Canada. The locomotive was maintained by the UCRS for several years, later by members of the Toronto Locomotive Preservation Society. In June 2009, the locomotive was moved to Roundhouse Park for incorporation into the Toronto Railway Heritage Centre."
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The image above shows #6213 residing on the CPR John St. Roundhouse in 2009 after having been moved there that year from the CNE.
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If you wish to read these daily postings from Derek, simply join the Toronto Railway Heritage Yahoo Group List by clicking here.
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Posting by Russ Milland; Image from TRHA website home page

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This museum, while much more extensive than ours will ever be, because of its size, was a very interesting place to visit, and perhaps we can gather some ideas for our Toronto museum.
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The site is the original location of the Central of Georgia Savannah Repair Shops, which were closed in 1963 when the Central was purchased by the Southern Railway. After years of neglect the Southern began to demolish several of the structures; but a group of concerned citizens halted the destruction and title to the property was transferred to the City of Savannah. The site continued to remain abandoned and decaying until the Coastal Heritage Society accepted management of the complex. Currently, the structures are being restored to serve as interpretive and exhibit space for the railroad museum and to house elements of the planned expansion, to include the Savannah History Museum and a new children’s museum. They also hope to develop a functional restoration shop for historic railroad rolling stock.
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The above is taken pretty much verbatim from the brochure handed out. However, my personal observation is that they already have quite a collection of equipment and buildings, most of which appears in pretty good display shape. They also have at least one steam engine which they occasionally fire up. Here (starting at the upper left) are captions for the pictures:
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Picture 1 is an overall view of the roundhouse and turntable at a music festival event at the facility.
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Picture 2 is their little "critter" that they use to move equipment around with. It has an automotive-type transmission and control.
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Picture 3 is their model layout on display which is a reasonably accurate representation of the site.
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Picture 4 is a rear view of the roundhouse.
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Picture 5 is the smokestack complex, which is an identifying feature of the site, when you approach it from the city.
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Picture 6 is a sample of one of their display signs, which also explains a bit about the smokestack complex.

For more about the Savannah Georgia Roundhouse Railroad Museum, visit their website by clicking here.

Posting and Pictures by Dave Flinn

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This past weekend, our dedicated volunteers continued to pursue restoration work. As you will read in these reports by two of our volunteers, the work involves a lot of small tasks and takes siginifcant amounts of time and elbow grease to complete.
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This is Not a Picasso by James Rasor
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"Work on the TH&B Caboose went very well this weekend thanks to Bob, Lance, Richard and James. Test paints for the exterior were applied using two samples provided to TRHA by Benjamin Moore who has been generously helping us match the original red and the original yellow applied on top of the red. A small area is also being tested to see how different primer colours may affect the test paint before we make a final decision. Inside the caboose, work went very well with all the backside of the metal sheathing painted and all the new structural supports painted."
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As the F7 turns by Dan Garcia
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"First order of business was to check the flooring - any spots that we were a bit unsure upon installation last week we are no longer concerned with. The floor feels as solid if not more so than it did before. . After that, we got to work. Stephen ripped out the old wires from the ceiling conduits and ran twine in place, while Richard painted the outsides of the exterior doors - they look great. Richard also finished painting the steps into the nose, which should be able to be installed next week. The three of us then got to work on the various electrical door panels, Richard painting while Stephen and I prepped. We also removed the two interior engine room doors and did the same. All of the doors now have a coat of grey metal primer on one side, and will get the second coat next week. . Stephen also did some additional cleaning in the nose of the cab and painted the "kickplate" at the edge of the steps. I took a grinder to some of the bits of metal that were still sticking out a fair distance into the space allocated for the sofa."
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Posting By Russ Milland; Pictures by Stephen Gardiner, Lance Gleich and James Rasor
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The TRHA offers tours of Union Station on the last Saturday of each month at 11 a.m. Cost is $10 each payable on arrival for the tour. Reservations are not necessary and those interested should meet by the Traveler's Aid counter in the centre of the Great Hall at 10:50 a.m. For more about these tours, click here.

Click on the video below to watch the action!
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As Michael Guy continues to explore the miniature railways of Florida, he has posted this fine video of action captured on Friday February 19th at the Largo Central Railroad near Tampa Florida during their annual four-day long "Meet".
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Posting by Russ Milland; Video by Michael Guy
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Michael Guy is on a "busman's holiday" (as we used to call them) in Florida where he is spending some of his time visiting local miniature railway clubs. In the pictures above, we find Michael at the controls of a centre cab switcher very similar to the one that we are building.
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In the video below, we see some great train action at the Florida Live Steamers' February 15th meet at their Central Pasco and Gulf Miniature Railway. The passenger and freight traisn that they have built are very impressive models.
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Posting by Russ Milland; Pictures and movie by Michael Guy
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Click on each picture for a closer look!
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The Canadian Association of Railway Modellers (CARM) was formed in October of 2003 to:

• to inspire.
• to foster fellowship among railway modellers throughout Canada.
• to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and skills between railway modellers.
• to promote the hobby of railway modelling in Canada.
• to be inclusive of all scales and interests.
• to work in co-operation with other organizations.

Each year, CARM host a small train show just west of Hamilton and north of Highway 403 in Copetown, Ontario. The show is focussed on:

• Operating Canadian prototype layouts
• Displays by model craftsmen
• Railway Special Interest Groups
• Canadian Model Manufacturers Displays and Sales
• Photo Vendors

In the pictures above and below we find Jason Shron of Rapido Trains, one of the participating vendors, showing off his instant telephone pole product and a number of images of the fine modelling work on display at past shows.

This year, the show will be held this coming Sunday as follows:

Date: Sunday February 21st, 2010

Location:

Copetown And District Community Centre,
1950 Governor’s Road, just east of Hwy. 52
Copetown, ON

Time: 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM

Admission cost: $5.00.
Refreshments will be on sale at the site and the
The Copetown Centre is wheelchair accessible.

For more information and a map, you may download and print the train show flyer by clicking here. For more about CARM, click here.
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The Toronto Railway Historical Association (TRHA) will also be at the show with a booth.
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Posting and pictures by Russ Milland
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Each year, the Barrie-Allandale Railway Modelers Association host a train show in Barrie, Ontario which is about an hour's drive north of Toronto. This year's show happens this coming weekend as follows:
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Saturday, Feb 20th, 2010 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
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Sunday, February 21st, 2010 from 10 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

at the Bradford Greenhouses Garden Gallery
Located at Highway 90 @ Hwy 27
Barrie, Ontario

They will have over over 18,000 square feet of operating layouts and 80 vendor tables.
In 2009, they had 25 vendors and 15 layouts participating. This year, we will be manning a Toronto Railway Historical Association booth at this show.
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Posting by Russ Milland

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It was a very productive Saturday for us today! I believe we had a total of 10 people.
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A crew of four removed old structural wood from the west side of the caboose and prepared new wood. The entire steel sheathing on the one side has been primed and treated, and a full three-quarters of the vertical wood pieces are either installed or just about ready to install. All that is left is the horizontal stringer to be notched and placed. Much of the scrap wood that was in the caboose has also been cleaned out.
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Another pair of volunteers were hard at work bringing several long sections of rail into the stalls from storage under the water tower and then straightening them to prepare them for installation in the miniature railway depot.
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Two of us continued to work on the F7 diesle cab. We managed to get both sheets of the main floor prepared and installed. We also cleaned up many of the sharp edges that were located throughout the cab and in the future seating area. A couple of locations still feel a bit on the "soft" side, but the vast majority of the floor is as solid as it was before, if not more so. We also sanded and began painting the nose steps. They should be finished for next weekend.
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Posting by Dan Garcia; Pictures by Bob Dickson,, Lance Gleich, Stephen Gardiner and James Rasor
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The Kichener-Waterloo Record newspaper reported in an article titled "Staying on the Rails" on February 5th, 2010 that the City of Stratford, Ontario would on February 9th take possession of a 17-acre site which house the remains of the immense Stratford CN Shops. The city expropriated the site and agreed to pay $4.5 million, plus interest and legal fees for it.
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Stratford was a major railway centre long before it became famous for its annual Shakespearean festival. The shops were originally built for the Grand Trunk Railway (GTR) in 1908 for the maintenance and repair of locomotives. The GTR became the Canadian National Railway in 1923 and took over the locomotive repair shops.
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The locomotive workshop is enormous - 70 feet wide, 50 feet high and 790 feet long. There are two wings, each more than 500 feet long. In all, there is about 159,000 square feet of space on the ground floor and 23,000 square feet on the second floor. The building itself covers about 11 of the site's 17 acres.
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The picture at the above left shows the shops in April of 2003. A few months later, the shops suffered a massive fire as shown in the middle picture leaving the shell of the facility left as shown at the right above.
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The City of Stratford plans to immediately deed 1.3 acres of the site not covered by the shops to the University of Waterloo's Stratford Institute for Digital Media Research.
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Controversy is now swirling around the need to assess the heritage value of the shops and decide on whether the shops themselves will be part of any further redevelopment of the site.
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For more information, read the Kitchener-Waterloo Record article by clicking here.
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Posting by Russ Milland; Pictures by Tom Landers

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Bob Dickson reports on progress this week as a small team of volunteers decided to work during the week to accelerate the renovation of the TH&B caboose:
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"After some minor hiccups early in the week progress is finally starting to show. The learning curve is slowing and it now looks like we will again have walls in the TH&B caboose. Monday showed little progress. After a late start I was able to make a little headway and left for the GO train about 5:30. Tom Murison kindly sharpened our chisels and after a short 7:30 am meeting, Tuesday began. Jim arrived at 9:00 a.m. and together we pushed the envelope. We managed to cut some boards to the right size and began fitting pieces. Wednesday was more of the same as well as painting of the steel. By end of day Wednesday we had cut and fitted enough wood to make it look presentable. Hopefully by Thursday's end we will be smiling ear to ear."
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Posting and pictures by Bob Dickson

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A week ago, we fetched a 7 ¼" gauge 0-4-0 quarry-type coal fired steam locomotive from its storage shed in Hamilton, Ontario as shown in the picture at the upper right. This engine was built in the early 1980's to a popular miniature locomotive design by Roger Marsh known as the 'Romulus'. It is typical of the 2 foot gauge Welsh quarry engines used in slate mines and worldwide for light industrial railways in the 1900's. In the pictures at the above left, we see the engine in operation at the Golden Horseshoe Live Steamers track in Hamilton, Ontario and at Milton's Steam Era festival (middle picture).
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As shown in the remaining photos, the engine is now in the shops being overhauled for use next season as an additional engine on our miniature railway. Here we see it being dismantled in order to get at the boiler and chassis for maintenance work it to ensure that it is robust and safe for next season's operation.
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Posting by Russ Milland; Pictures by Stephen Gardiner & Russ Milland
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Click on each picture for a closer look!
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As suggested in our last posting, a second locomotive is under development in our miniature railway shops; a 7-¼” gauge replica of our full-sized 50 ton CLC-Whitcomb diesel-electric switcher. The miniature will use a gasoline engine driving a hydraulic transmission which in turn is used to drive two hydraulic motors, one on each truck. Like on its big brother each motor drives one axle, the second axle is driven by the side rods.
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Here we see an historic photo of our full size Whitcomb plus a number of photos of the miniature engine under construction.
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Posting by Michael Guy; Pictures by John D. Thompson & Michael Guy
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Click on each picture for a closer look!
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Once again we had a great turnout this past weekend and our teams continued to focus on the restoration of the TH&B Caboose, the F7 Diesel Cab and the disassembly of a locomotive.
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The F7 Cab work included the preparation of a second layer of flooring, checking some loudspeakers that we have acquired so that we can include appropriate engine and track sounds in our simulation, vacuuming the cab to clean out more sand and painting of the control stands. Last of all, we loaded up a large bin of bits and pieces to be sent out for sandblasting and painting.
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In the photo at the right below, we now find three locomotives in our miniature railway shop. One is, of course, our Sweet Creek 2-6-0 steam locomotive whose development was extensively covered in earlier posts. The other two, one of which was disassembled this weekend, will be introduced to you in subsequent news postings.
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Posting by Russ Milland; Pictures by Stephen Gardiner, Lance Gleich, Michael Guy and James Rasor
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Click on each picture for a closer look!
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VIA Rail advised us this week that they had five teak railway benches for sale as surplus to their needs. We have acquired two of these benches for the Toronto Railway Heritage Centre. One of these will be used in Don Station as one of the original benches is no longer there.
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Posting by Russ; Pictures by Lance Gleich

Wikepedia is an incredible experiment on the Internet. It was designed to allow anyone to go in and help build an encyclopaedia on the Internet. Anyone can make an entry and everyone else reviews those entries and can change them if they have more information or more correct information. We often turn to Wikipedia to provide you with more information on railway related news as there is a lot of railway related information on Wikipedia. Wikipedia has been so successfuul that it now has 3,180,000 articles in the English language alone.
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We have now launched an "article" (as each entry is known on Wikipedia) for the Toronto Railway Heritage Centre. You may read the article here. We and perhaps others will be working to grow the article and add to the information about our evolving museum.
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Posting by Russ Milland

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Thomas Blampied first came to our attention when he offered us the use of a picture he took of the TRHA's Pyke Crane in action. I then became aware of his railway images at photopic.com on the Internet. I was very impressed with the very professional quality of his photography. I then noticed that he had a link to a book that he self-published electronically on the Internet using an on-demand publishing service. This is an exciting new way for an author to publish a book without having to heavily invest up front in a large print run. Intrigued by the quality of the sample pages on the publishing website, I bought a copy online. This triggered the publishing service to use their automated computers to print a single copy and then mail it to me so that I received it a week or so after ordering it.
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I followed up with Thomas for more information about the book and he advised me as follows:
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"I actually started the project last year while I was studying in the United Kingdom. I found that there was a lack of books on GTA (Greater Toronto Area) railways (especially contemporary). I felt that it would be a good idea if there was a record for historians and enthusiasts to look back on in a few decades time. The photos themselves were taken over a period of about six years and the book itself took about one year from first draft to final publication in June 2009.
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For me, the most interesting part is how the book's theme of change has been so apparent already. I look at my photos of the GO Bathurst Yard, the CP Oshawa Yard and even the GO yard at Whitby and changes are apparent even in my one year away! I wonder what other locations in the book might look like in the future?
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It was a challenge to come up with favourite photos (most of the book is favourite photos and the first draft was double the size) so I have chosen a variety of shots showing historical events or interesting trains. I hope that you like them."
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The book is a softcover 80 page book printed on very high quality paper and includes 86 colour photographs and 2 in black and white for dramatic effcet. Thomas has included textual introductions to each section and has extensively captioned each photogrpah to explain them. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and recommend it to others. While its cost may at first seem high at about $40.00 including shipping to Canada, one must remember that this is self-published using an on-demand publishing facility which is currently more expensive than a book printed in a large volume run. For the serious railfan, the cost is quite affordable to my mind.
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Included here are a number of images from the book as follows (from the upper left):
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• Rail of the GTA - Book Cover
• 1st Revenue Producing run of the new GO MP40 with EMD FP9 #560 along as insurance
• New GO MPI MP40 #610 running through Whitby towarsd Oshawa
• CN EMD GP9's #7082 and #4102 pulling a Scale Test Car at Whitby
• ONR EMD GP38-2 #1805 pulling the Northlander into Union Station with a GO Bilevel car destined for the ONR paint shops
• The TRHA Whitcomb #1 beside the John St. Roundhouse
  

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You can view Thomas gallery of great railway imagesby clicking here. at To learn more about the book and view sample pages, click here.

Posting by Russ Milland; Images by Thomas Blampied
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Click on each image for a closer look!
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Derek Boles, TRHA's historian, publishes a daily posting on the Toronto Railway Heritage Yahoo Group List. These postings document major railway oriented events that happened on that day of the year. One of today's items is as follows:

"February 2, 1927:
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Canadian National Railway opens the Toronto Locomotive and Car Facilities, more popularly known as the Spadina Roundhouse. The new facilities were part of the massive railway redevelopment taking place in the 1920s in conjunction with the new Union Station and elevated waterfront viaduct. Much to the delight of train enthusiasts, the Spadina Avenue bridge crossed over the engine terminal, providing an easily accessible vantage point for three generations of rail photographers. The facilities included a 36-s tall engine house with a 100-foot turntable and a coach yard accommodating 275 passenger cars. Construction was carried out by Anglin-Norcross, who would later build the CPR John Street facilities.
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The Spadina site was first occupied by the Ontario, Simcoe & Huron and Grand Trunk Railways in the 1850s. A few years later, the GTR built a fully enclosed roundhouse and turntable which, as it turned out, was not to be the first domed structure on the site. Spadina remained CN's principal passenger facility in Toronto and was taken over by VIA Rail in 1978. The facilities were closed in 1986 after VIA relocated to Mimico and Skydome now occupies the site."
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If you wish to read these daily postings from Derek, simply join the Yahoo Group by clicking here.
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In the pictures here of the roundhouse and its immediate surroundings, we find the following images starting at the upper left image:
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• May 5th, 1956: CNR #6401 4-8-4 Northern in the service area beside the roundhouse
• January, 1966: CNR 4-8-4 Northern #6167 inside the roundhouse
• July 14th, 1985: FP-9 #6506 inside the roundhouse
• January, 1966: Inside the Spadina Shop attached to the roundhouse
• May 20th, 1985: Spadina Roundhouse's Wheel Shop and gantry crane
• May 30th, 1985: Back ends of LRC's inside the roundhouse