In 2007, twelve years ago as of this post, the Toronto Railway Historical Association’s website first launched at trha.ca. It was used primarily to document the activities of TRHA volunteers as well as railway history topics from the Toronto area. Like the rest of the TRHA, the website was and continues to be administered solely by volunteers. Alongside countless other events and milestones, the TRHA website was used to report on the 2010 opening of the Toronto Railway Museum, which now has its own website. Unfortunately, the TRHA’s volunteers became spread too thin and this website went relatively inactive after 2015. The last blog post showed the restoration progress of our CNR caboose, which has since been fully restored and put on display in Roundhouse Park.

This is where I come in. I gained a passing interest in local railway history during high school but was frustrated with the lack of online resources on the topic. Many websites, including that of the Toronto Railway Historical Association, had rapidly become outdated in both design and content. It didn’t help that the website had already been sitting for two years by this point, with some pages having clearly remained untouched since 2010 or earlier. The TRHA website had ironically become a time capsule of itself which no longer represented the current state of the TRHA or the Toronto Railway Museum. It deserved better. By the end of high school I had settled on computer programming and web development as a career path, but my underlying interest in railway history had only grown. I started volunteering with the TRHA in the summer of 2018, now a year into my college course where I had gained some experience with web development. I was originally a docent and I interpreted the various artifacts on display for museum visitors, but soon asked whether involvement with the TRHA website was a possibility. It turned out I wasn’t the only one interested in reviving the site – Volunteer and Chief Systems Officer Russ Milland was already in the middle of building a new TRHA website from scratch on the WordPress platform. Russ’s schedule kept him from continuing his work on the website, which gave me the opportunity to start contributing on that front. I began taking concepts I learned in my web development classes and applied them here, focusing on aesthetic appeal, accessibility, and responsive design. Content was ripped directly from the old website and only the most egregiously outdated information was changed.

In addition to my work on the website’s design, I started looking into more local railway history to produce new website content. It wasn’t easy; I had far more questions than answers, and each answer always seemed to lead to more questions than I started with. It would have been impossible without the guidance of Derek Boles, the TRHA’s Chief Historian. He pointed me to numerous articles he’d written for a variety of publications beyond just this website. He’s also bought several railway history books and sent them to me free of charge, including his own book titled Toronto’s Railway History (Which is an excellent read, by the way). It was everything I needed to get started. A year has now passed, and today the Toronto Railway Historical Association’s new website has officially gone live! There is still much work to do, and I ask that our visitors bear with us as I work out the kinks. I can only dedicate so much time to this project as a volunteer and the sole administrator of this website. There is much discussion to be had over what parts of the website we need more of, which parts we have outgrown, and any other ways we can adapt this medium to our needs.

There are numerous areas of the website which have seen some recent changes as well as some brand new additions. The section of our website that lists our passenger cars now includes our GO Transit Hawker-Siddeley cab car, which was donated to the museum two years after the old website went inactive. We envision the TRHA website as the go-to resource for railway history in Toronto, going far beyond just what we have on our history page. Our blog fulfilled this role to a certain extent up to this point, but the previous twelve years of blog posts often get buried and become virtually invisible to our website’s visitors. To avoid this problem, we will be making use of static webpages to ensure certain historical topics remain easily accessible for all visitors. These webpages will generally be organized into the following two topics:

Railway Companies

There are numerous resources on the internet which cover the histories of railway companies that have existed in Canada, but these are often broad and rarely focus on the events in any one city or region. In our new railways page, I intend to document the railway companies that have existed or continue to exist in Toronto from 1853 to the present day. These histories will focus on the influence the railway companies had on the Toronto area specifically, and some larger events will only be included to provide additional context. The information found in this section of our website will supplement the more specific historical topics covered by our blog. These webpages will be written gradually as the necessary information and images are compiled, so be sure to check back as more of the links become active.

Passenger Stations

Since the roundhouse our museum occupies was almost exclusively intended to service passenger equipment, it only seems natural that passenger rail would encompass much of our website’s historical topics. Passenger stations were once a fixture of nearly every town and city across North America, ranging from tiny shacks to some of the finest examples of their architectural periods. The vast majority were torn down in the postwar era and very few ever saw a replacement. On our new stations page, we seek to document every railway station that has ever existed within the Greater Toronto Area. The TRHA had previously covered the histories of different railway stations closer to downtown Toronto in various blog and social media posts, but this new section of our website seeks to maximize visibility for website visitors. Many of our museum’s visitors live in the suburban areas that surround Toronto; areas that do not have a railway museum of their own. Covering the histories of individual passenger stations in those areas enables us to produce something of interest for the population of over three million people who live there. Furthermore, we will be able to write about the passenger stations within downtown Toronto in more detail than ever before. The current layout of the stations page – a list of links – is only a temporary measure until a more unique approach can be explored. I acknowledge that there are other websites that document passenger stations in southern Ontario to varying extents, but I intend to make this section of our website as unique as possible – both in terms of the information and photographs we show as well as the way these are presented. Much like the railways page, the stations page will have its links made active over time as the necessary information and images are compiled.

What Now?

Our website is not currently monetized and there are no plans to do so in the future. There is no ability to like or comment on posts or pages yet. The latter would require a degree of moderation that I wouldn’t be able to pull off on my own. The best way you can support this website is to engage with it: take a look around, and keep an eye out for new content. We invite you to bookmark our website so you can easily come back to it. You can enter your email address to subscribe to our blog, which means you will be sent an email notification each time a new blog post comes out. The number of website visitors and the number of subscribers are currently the only metrics we use to determine the popularity of the website. Sharing the website to others through social media or word of mouth will also help tremendously.