Click on each picture for a closer look!
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One Day at the John Street Roundhouse in 1966, on April 8 to be exact, I made my first extended visit to Toronto with my parents. I was 16 at the time and lived and had grown up in Montreal. I had passed through the city before on my way to visit my grandparents who lived in Fort Erie but this was my first overnight stay in Toronto. We stayed at the Royal York Hotel which, at the time, was owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway.
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The first night, after dinner, I crossed Front Street to check out Union Station. Railway security was very different 43 years ago and I was able to wander up through the trainshed and across the yards to John Street where I took these photographs.
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#1: Canadian Pacific No. 6539 hauls a Rail Diesel Car from Union Station to the roundhouse. RDC cars provided most of CP’s passenger service in 1966 and this single car had probably come in earlier from Peterboro (as it was still known in CP timetables). The road crew brought the car into Union Station and the yard crew then hauled it over to John Street. 6539 was an Alco S3 built by the Montreal Locomotive Works in 1955 and the 2009 Trackside Guide indicates that the unit is in Schreiber, Ontario.
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#2: RDC No 9049 on the turntable. This car was built in 1955 for the Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic and sold to CP in 1958. It later became VIA No. 6124 and was sold to Cuba in 1998.
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#3: In 1966 the roundhouse was used for the maintenance and storage of Rail Diesel Cars. This portion of the roundhouse is now occupied by Steam Whistle.
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#4: An obliging engineer (I don’t use the term “hogger.” I’m not fond of railway idioms that make one sound like a pig) posed on the steps of Canadian Pacific No. 7059. The locomotive was a sister engine of our Alco S2 No. 7020, but built three years later in 1947. It was retired in the 1980s. The structure on the right is the stores building, demolished in the 1990s. The approximate contemporary location of this photograph is the Don Station.
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#5: Canadian Pacific Dental Car No. 69 was used to provide dental care in remote communities along the line. The car was originally the 8- section, 4- double bedroom sleeper Vaudreuil built in 1931 and converted in 1960. There was a Canadian National dental car in the CRHA Toronto collection that ended up at the Railway Museum of Eastern Ontario in Smiths Falls.
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#6: CP No. 6540 is switching piggyback trailer cars near York Street. The locomotive was an Alco S3, the next generation up from 7020 and was built by the Montreal Locomotive Works in 1955. The line of passenger cars in the background belong to the New York Central and are being marshalled for the overnight train to New York scheduled to leave at 8:05 PM. The structure behind the cars is the Postal Delivery Building, now the Air Canada Centre.
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#7: CP No. 8576 was an Alco RS10S built by MLW in 1956. They were only built in Canada and this unit was equipped with a steam generator for passenger service. At this point they were frequently seen hauling The Canadian.
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What I find most amusing about these images is that I completely forgot about them and my 1966 visit to John Street until I came across the photographs a few years ago, long after I became involved with the TRHA. Little did I know I would be back here some forty years after I had taken these images.
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Posting and pictures by Derek Boles, TRHA Historian
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