Click on the picture for a closer look!
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The above illustration shows the site of the 1858 Union Station, now buried under 17 feet of landfill that supports the railway viaduct built for the present Union Station in the 1920s. Although all the railway tracks using Toronto’s first Union Station have since been replaced and realigned, GO Transit and VIA Rail continue to offer passenger service along the original routes. These are now all owned by Canadian National Railway except for the Union Station Rail Corridor between the Don River and Bathurst Street, which is owned by GO Transit. Many of the original right of ways still exist in the following forms:

• The Ontario, Simcoe & Huron Railway route now hosts GO service between Toronto and Barrie.
• The Great Western Railway route is used for the GO Lakeshore West corridor as well as VIA trains for Niagara Falls, London and Windsor and the daily Amtrak train to New York City.
• The Grand Trunk’s Western Division now carries GO trains to Georgetown and VIA trains to Guelph, Kitchener, London and Sarnia.
• The Grand Trunk’s Eastern Division hosts the GO Lakeshore East corridor as well as VIA’s numerous trains between Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal.

Click here to read the next in this series of excerpts from Derek’s article on Toronto’s 1st Union Station.

By Derek Boles, TRHA Historian