Summary

Between 1912 and 1914, the Canadian Pacific Railway built a diversion of its mainline between Toronto and Smiths Falls. On paper it was called the Campbellford, Lake Ontario & Western Railway but in all public advertising it was simply referred to as Canadian Pacific’s Lake Ontario Shore Line. One of its passenger stations was located just west of where the new line crossed Whites Road. This was halfway between Third Concession and Finch Avenue and over a kilometre southeast of the small hamlet of Cherrywood. The station building followed Canadian Pacific’s standard No. 5 design which was large relative to the size of the community it served. It was a wood-frame structure with a second floor containing the station agent’s living quarters. This was a common design feature in rural areas where doing so was more cost efficient than building separate accommodations. Service to Cherrywood over this new line commenced on June 29th, 1914, and initially only saw four passenger trains per day (one Toronto-Ottawa through train and a local Toronto-Belleville train in each direction). This quickly doubled to eight passenger trains per day by the 1920’s.

Cherrywood Station was overbuilt for its rural surroundings and service was quickly clawed back towards the mid- and late-1920’s. By 1929, there were only two trains stopping at Cherrywood per day (one in each direction) before the Great Depression began negatively affected passenger ridership. Cherrywood Station closed to passengers altogether in 1933, the same year the pool train agreement between CN and CP took effect. This agreement moved a considerable amount of CP passenger traffic over to CN between the cities of Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. Cherrywood continued to appear on CPR timetables with no trains listed next to it throughout the depression, likely only being used as a telegraph and train order office during this period. The pool train agreement persisted for over two decades after the end of the depression and passenger rail service would never return to Cherrywood. It continued to be used in an auxiliary capacity until 1961, when Centralized Traffic Control (CTC) replaced the older system of Train Order Operation and rendered the station building obsolete. It was abandoned and torn down a few years later in 1964. While there is little trace of Cherrywood Station today, the remaining telegraph poles which run parallel to the railway still weave around the former station site.

Condensed Station Info:

Location:	Served By:	Current State:	Date Built:	Date Demolished:
Whites Road	Canadian Pacific Railway (1914 – 1933)	Demolished	1914	1964