Summary

The area of Pickering Township was settled around the intersection of Kingston Road and Mill Street in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, growing to a population of 3,450 people by 1845. While work was progressing on the Grand Trunk Railway south of Pickering in 1856, two passenger stations were built within the community’s vicinity. One called Duffin’s Creek was located at what is now Squires Beach Road, and another called Frenchman’s Bay was built two miles further west near the modern-day intersection of Bayly and Begley Street. No photographs are known to exist of either of these stations, but it can be assumed that they would have followed the same design as all the other stations built during the Montreal-Toronto line’s construction. This was a rectangular structure with grey limestone exterior walls and a pitched roof with up to four chimneys, with surviving examples in Port Hope, Napanee and Ernestown. The first train arrived at Duffin’s Creek and Frenchman’s Bay stations on August 11th, 1856, though regular service between Toronto and Montreal did not commence until October 27th of that year. By the time of Canada’s confederation in 1867, Duffin’s Creek station was seeing four trains per day while only two were due to stop at Frenchman’s Bay.

Between 1881 and 1903, the Grand Trunk aimed to build a second main track along the entire Toronto-Montreal line. This work did not reach Pickering until 1901, but the ensuing two years would involve some of the most significant changes since the Grand Trunk’s arrival in 1856. Part of the work involved flattening segments of the right-of-way with a significant uphill or downhill grade, as they could cause broken knuckles on longer trains. The Frenchman’s Bay station in particular was located quite close to the body of water it was named after, and so the terrain there was naturally lower than the surrounding areas. As part of the double track efforts, Frenchman’s Bay station was dismantled to make way for a high embankment which raised the tracks near the bay. Duffin’s Creek station was similarly torn down around the same time, but a replacement station was built on the same site immediately after. This new station was only slightly larger than its predecessor, but it was now called Pickering instead of Duffin’s Creek. The structure itself consisted primarily of wood and included some more architectural embellishments in the roof and bay window. A house was also located across the tracks from the station, presumably built by the railway as living quarters for the station agent and their family. However, it’s unknown if this was built with the new station or if it existed alongside the previous one. Pickering remained a stop after the financially ailing Grand Trunk was nationalized and merged into Canadian National in 1923. A total of eleven passenger trains stopped at Pickering each day by 1940.

The popularization of automobiles and air travel during the postwar era contributed to a significant decline in rail passenger ridership across Canada during the postwar era. When Highway 2A (now Highway 401) was built through Pickering in 1947, it severed the road Pickering Station was situated on in two. The northern half was called Notion Road and the southern half became Squires Beach Road, the latter of which was now the only way the station could be accessed. This, combined with the station’s distance of roughly 1.5 kilometres from Pickering Village, only further disincentivized local residents from taking the train. The final nail in the coffin was Canadian National’s construction of a bypass for freight traffic during the 1960’s to allow trains to reach the new MacMillan Yard in Vaughan. This bypass connected to the former Grand Trunk line at Pickering, and this included a third track which was laid along its north side for 2.4 kilometres from Liverpool Road to a point just west of Pickering Station. In 1967, the station and all adjacent railway buildings were demolished to allow the extension of this third track by a distance of roughly 350 metres further east.

The same year that Canadian National’s Pickering Station was torn down, provincial transit agency GO Transit opened their own Pickering Station 2.2 kilometres to the west. It remained the eastern terminus of GO service until the Lakeshore East line was extended to Oshawa in 1990.

Condensed Station Info:

Location:	Served By:	Current State:	Date Built:	Date Demolished:
Squires Beach Road	Grand Trunk (1856 – 1923) Canadian National (1923 – 1967)	Demolished	1856 (First) 1901 (Second)	1901 (First) 1967 (Second)