Toronto Railway Heritage Centre Update

Greetings and salutations to all my friends in the UK here at Nat Pres.

Haven't posted much lately, but have been keeping an eye on the various goings on across the pond. It's looking less likely that i will be making a trip over in 2010 to keep my string of appearances going, though i am still holding out hope to find a way to join the Bluebell for their 50th Anniversary Gala in August!

In any event, i wanted to provide an update on the work to establish the Toronto Railway Heritage Centre at the Canadian Pacific John Street Roundhouse. There was a thread last year, and it got lost in various upgrades to the forum. As a reminder, the overall site plan is below:



As of now, the status of projects is that the Miniature Railway is complete and functional for testing purposes. There is still a switch near the coaling tower to be installed in the spring when some track re-alignment needs to be done at the west end of the loop to address some rough trackwork, and the servicing building is not yet fitted out internally by the contractors to allow us to get equipment and locomotives inside. For our first season, the goal is to have 4 locomotives available, 2 steam and 2 diesel. One Steam Locomotive is a 2-6-0 Mogul Sweet Creek, built from a kit and can be seen in the first video below on her maiden test run last year at the Golden Horseshoe Live Steamers in Hamilton. The 2nd video & pictures shows testing of the minature railway on New Years day 2010.

Sweet Creek Test

New Years Day (I'm the first passenger on the carriage)

High Speed Lap of the Mini Rail line.


Aside from the Miniature Railway, we will have the "Railway Village" consisting of four re-located structures from Toronto's railway past. The Don Station, Cabin D (a signal box in UK parlance), the Cabin D Tool Shed and a Level Crossing Guards house. The restoration of these structures is progressing nicely, and the work can be seen in the shot below showing off the new lighting to provide security at night and general park lighting



Inside the three museum stalls, we are busy working on several projects, the restoration of an 1890's wooden caboose which was sheeted in steel in the 1950's by the Toronto Hamilton and Buffalo Railway. There is a lot of rot in the wood and a crew of volunteers has been busy stripping away the rot and working to replace the wood. A second team has been working on the Cab of an F7 locomotive which is being turned into a simulator. You will be able to sit in the engineers seat and drive the locomotive through a computer simulation of Toronto in the 1950's. The third major inside project is the restoration of an 18ton self propelled Pyke Rail Crane donated by Toronto Terminal Railways in late 2009. It needs new windows and replacement of missing engine components along with a re-paint to remove graffiti to allow it to be moved outside for display


Caboose Interior Restoration


Shunting the F7 cab into stall 16 after it was delivered and mounted to its truck

Finally, the my set of images on flickr along with the TRHA blog are regularly updated with the projects we are working on. We are aiming to have our soft opening for Doors Open Toronto at the end of May, with an official Grand Opening sometime over the summer.

If you are in Toronto, be sure to swing by and say hi. Right now the stalls and buildings aren't open to the public, but arrangements can be made for a quick tour of the stalls and the restoration work in progress.

Regards,

Stephen

 

It is a shame, but we got all that was left of it. The cab and pilot of 9159 was privately purchased from a scrap yard and all the room the original owner had was for the Cab, so that we have that much is better than nothing. As a sense of how heavy just that much of an F7 is, look at the picture, it needs training wheels in front of the truck to provide the counterbalance that the other 60 feet of locomotive used to, its severely nose heavy as is so the extra axle is the only way to keep it from falling over!

Fortunately, we have most of the cab fittings of the F7 so it will hopefully look really good when we get that much done. A bit of the history of 9159 from the TRHA Blog: http://www.trha.ca/2009/10/cn-f7-9159-58-year-journey-part-1-of.html

 

My sister lives in Pickering ON and I visit every 2 years or so. Looks like I'll be escaping downtown on the GO train !

 

Thanks Stephen for your update on the Toronto Museum , I seem to get more updates via the UK than from Canada! -- must have something to do with the Olympics -- eh !

 

So an update on the Toronto Railway Heritage Centre, the early arrival of spring (close to the arrival of Summer with plus 20degree weather of late) has us moving ahead at a full pace clip. Full work sessions all weekend over easter have seen continued progress on many fronts.

The Miniature Railway Depot building is being fitted out, the storage and maintenance tracks are being installed inside the building, and the miniature turntable is installed and operational for getting from the depot to the mainline. Once the three raised work tracks are installed, our locomotives can be moved to the depot and track testing can commence in earnest. A view inside the depot building is below:



Inside the stalls, the first 2/3 of the "west" side of the Caboose wall is complete in terms of structure, work has been started on repairing and re-installing the windows while the "east" side has had the tongue and groove walling removed and the rotten wood removed to start the process of rebuilding it. Once the front 2/3 of the wall on each side is done, work will move on to restoration of the Cupola area. A repaint into Toronto Hamilton and Buffalo Red as carried in the 1950's after the wooden caboose was sheeted in steel is planned to be done on at least one side for the end of May. A shot of the completed framing before the T&G was replaced is below:



The final major project moving ahead apace is the restoration of the F7 Cab and construction of the simulator inside it. Re-construction is continuing as we have finally sorted all the crud and re-placement of the floors, construction of new floor areas and priming of the rusted metal. Still lots of work to go with exterior body work, interior and exterior painting, electronics and testing, but it is slowly but surely getting there. A shot from several weeks back of the primed cab looking light years better is below:



Given our unique location in Downtown, with the Steamwhistle Brewery and Leon's furniture sharing the building, a photo shoot was staged a couple of weeks ago, three of our locomotives, CNR 6213, CNR 4803 and CPR 7020 were lined up on the radial tracks against the Leon's windows. My shot is a quickie to capture the scene, the official shot will be used for PR and in a book being prepared about the restoration of the roundhouse and development of the museum.



As well, if you are in the Toronto Area, May 29th and 30th is Doors Open Toronto, its a great event where many buildings not normally open to the public allow people in to see them. Included is the John Street Roundhouse and the Toronto Railway Heritage Centre. It will be our first official public weekend, with additional displays and extra locomotives hopefully visiting for the Miniature Railway.

 

Well, its finally upon us, our opening day (at least temporarily as the G20 Summit sees us barred from the site for most of June as the Metro Convention Centre is beneath parts of the Roundhouse building and park).

This Friday the park will be opened by Mayor of Toronto David Miller to launch Doors Open Toronto 2010, and Saturday and Sunday we will be full bore with the Miniature Railway, railway village structure tours, handcar rides, turntable rides, a demonstration freight set up on one of the radial tracks and tours of Stalls 15-17. While i know most of the readers of this forum won't be here this weekend, as the big days approach, the level of excitement amongst the volunteers is at a record high, as are our turnout of volunteers and hours of work we are putting in!!! As i know many on here are active volunteers, I'm sure you can appreciate the anticipation of a big unveiling of a project or an event you've worked hard on as it nears.

Some of the crew was at the Roundhouse from dawn to beyond dusk yesterday, and will be all week. I put in four hours after a 9 hour day at the office yesterday cleaning and preparing to put on a good show.

I will update with pictures and details of everything probably next week, but the weather forecast is for sun and hot temps all weekend, so we expect the park to be teeming with punters!!!



Cheers

Stephen

 

Congratulations on opening this week - great to see more heritage projects coming about in Canada - will have to put on to do list next time I'm in the center of the country .

Cheers Richard

 

Thanks Richard, but be careful about calling Toronto the Centre of the Country, thats somewhere near Winnipeg, we really think we are the Centre of the Universe!!!! (or so the rest of the country will gladly tell you if you say you are from Toronto when travelling!!)

Ralph, Thanks for the kind words, i think we have an incredible setup given how far the museum has come in the past year since construction started in earnest on the park and restoration of the railway village, hopefully sometime your travels bring you through Toronto and you can see it for yourself!

 

Stephen -- didn't want to inflate the Toronto ' ego' too much , so stayed away from the' Universe' -- but seriously you have a great set up there -- keep up the good work .

Cheers Richard

 

Well, after a day and a bit to recuperate from our first days open to the Public, I am pleased to report that our grand opening weekend at the Toronto Railway Heritage Centre can be classified as a success!!! We had the Mayor of Toronto and the VIP Party open the park on Friday morning, followed up by our participation in the annual Doors Open Toronto event on Saturday and Sunday, were thousands of members of the public visited the TRHC along with our neighbours on site, Steam Whistle Brewing and Leon's Furniture. Mayor Miller recounted tales of his youth in England with his Ian Allan ABC's and taking numbers of locomotives along with his family members who worked for the LNER in days of yore.


Above: Don Loucks (Heritage Architect from IBI Group for Roundhouse Park), Glen Garwood (City of Toronto - Manager of Strategic Policy & Projects, Cultural Affairs), Mayor David Miller, Orin Krivel (President of the TRHA) and Derek Boles (TRHA Historian) cut the ribbon to open the TRHC and Roundhouse Park.


Above: Mayor Miller at the helm of our official first train as Michael Guy, VP of the TRHA and our master of all things mechanical gives instructions and receives train orders from John Mellow, a former operator of the Don Station which is now restored and located at the TRHC.

Final numbers on visitor counts are still being taken, but we had over 2600 passengers on the Miniature Railway over the course of the two days, with one four car train running Saturday and two two-car trains running most of Sunday. We had our fair share of teething problems with hauling passengers for the first time ever, but we overcame the few minor derailments and cantankerous steam locomotives that saw us rely on our pair of "Diesel" locomotives which did fantastic service all weekend long.


TRHA No.2, the "Mini-Whitcomb" with a full four car train on Saturday passes its big brother, TRHA No.1 spotted with our demonstration freight.


View Full Size: http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4060/4652687442_322e93afe3_o.jpg
Panorama of Saturday mid-afternoon, with a bit of digital-polkery in the panorama thought process, TRHA No.2 and its train appear 4 times in the shot with the same run passing through the park.

Hopefully any of the National Preservation members who are ever over Canada way can come by, make sure to let us know you are coming and we can try to make sure that we are around to show you about the park.

Now we get the big transition from just getting to this point, by transitioning into the balance of operating museum, miniature railway and restoration shop.

Regards,

Stephen

 

Stephen,

I have been on the route from Manchester UK to Pearson for the last 5 years or so and have followed developments with great interest.
Now that you are up and running, is there a contact at the Museum for one to arrange a quick look around? Sadly, our schedule has us arriving in Toronto late evening, with only the following morning free before an evening departure for the return crossing. We are usually rostered for one or 2 flights to Toronto per month until the end of our summer season (Oct). Any possibility of a mid-week morning visit?

With thanks,
Graham

 

Hi Graham, as the site is an open City Park, at the very least, a visit to the site to look around the outside and the locomotives/stock on the patio is always possible. Because of volunteer numbers, we don't officially open on weekdays because we just don't have the people. That said, depending on when you are coming, we can always try to set something up to let you take a look inside the Stalls where restoration work is ongoing, but its hard to promise any availability for someone with keys to the stalls or buildings for a weekday. Best i can say is to let me know a date you will be in Toronto and we will see what we can do.

Manchester-Toronto, Thomas Cook Airlines? I took that route two Septembers ago when i went to the SVR Autumn Gala.

Cheers,

Stephen

 

Stephen,

How about Saturday 25 September ?

Regards,
Graham

 

Hi Graham, The site will be open on the 25th, the miniature railway should be running from Noon to 4pm that day, with the stalls open and the cab of CN Northern 6213 open for visits. I don't know if i will be around that day, but if you are definitely coming, i will see what i can do to be there and show you around, i am waiting on times for an unrelated event that day to be set so i know if i can be down at the museum myself!

Stephen

 

So, out first season has closed, have to call it a complete success in that we were able to run the miniature railway every Saturday and Sunday and holiday from our opening at the end of May to the final weekend of October, concluding with a Halloween event that while fun for the volunteers, was sadly lacking in visitors, but we made the most and learned lots. We also took baby steps toward running larger public events, undertaking a staged night shoot in late September to get publicity shots and learn what additional lighting we need to make the site work, and an impromptu night shoot when we ran low on kids Trick-or-Treating on Halloween Night.

We are now settling back into the winter routine of maintenance on the miniature railway, restoration on the heritage equipment, and starting the next phases of museum development in having the Railway Village structures completed so exhibits can be installed, and working on the Machine Shop area of the Roundhouse where the future museum space will be located.


CNR 4803, CPR 7020, CNR 6213 and TRHC 1 line up outside the John Street Roundhouse


CNR 4803 at Cabin D with the Toronto Skyline behind it. Lit by the headlight of TRHC No.1 as it backed away after shunting 4803 into position.


Sweet Creek, our main performer for the Miniature Railway blows off during our night-operations test in preparation for Halloween night.


Sweet Creek passes through the haunted woods on Halloween Eve during our spooktacular night run for the kids.

More photos of the TRHC are in my Flickr Set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/55976115@N00/sets/72157622934364484/ and regular news updates at our news blog: http://www.trha.ca/news.html

All in all, the volunteers have had a lot of fun, we have made a big first impression based on the smiles on those big and small riding the miniature railway, and we are ready for a big winter of projects to put an even better face forward in 2011.

We hope you will stop by if your travels ever bring you Toronto way. If you are in town over the winter, regular work bashes happen all day Saturday and some Sunday's, please let me know if you are coming so we can try to make sure someone is about to show you around.

Regards

Stephen Gardiner

 

Excellent night shots, looks a really interesting set-up.

 

Today's update goes under the heading of "Railroading in Winter is Hard!!!"

Many of you on NatPres no doubt had the opportunity to see "The Railway Children" at the NRM or Waterloo in the past couple of years, well, in late January, it was announced that the production is to be re-mounted here in Toronto, at the Toronto Railway Heritage Centre. We are all very excited to see the show mounted in our park, and everything that will go along with that in terms of bringing people to the museum. The production company which produced the play in the UK will be re-mounting it in a custom built 1000 seat theatre tent at Roundhouse Park starting in May of this year (More here: http://www.mirvish.com/shows/therailwaychildren and http://www.mirvish.com/homepagefeature/torontoget****therailwaychildren ). This has of course, necessitated changes in our plans for our 2nd season, in terms of the impact of having the play occupying a large area of the park, and in having our equipment sorted to free up space inside the stalls to host the shows locomotive. In addition, the 2nd half of the museum, the Machine Shop at the back of the stalls needs to be cleared so that it can be restored and equipped as our formal museum space, library and archives, as that part of the building has yet to be touched and is used as construction/storage space (i.e. the rods of CNR 6213, various heavy machine tools and artifacts from the roundhouse's operation days are stored there, and Sweet Creek, our miniature railway locomotive was built in the Machine Shop).

So, onto the railroading in winter is hard bit, after the winter in the UK this year, I am sure many of you have experienced frozen rails and body parts and all the fun of winter railroading. Being in a city park downtown for us, has pluses and minuses, the pluses are obvious, convenience of access, location, visibility, the minuses, sometimes are not as obvious. For us, a major minus is that over half our track is essentially level crossing or tramway, set in pavement where there is nowhere for cars to push snow/ice, leading to an increased risk of derailments when shunting in winter. To combat this, we spent Saturday shovelling/snowblowing/chipping at the railheads to expose them and the flangeways to ensure we could see any ice and remove it to prevent derailments for a major shunt, as i'll detail below, that didn't happen until Sunday for reasons beyond the snow and ice!!



Another minus is the cold. It saps the body when working outside, and makes "easy" tasks, like installing brasses on our "new" flatcar almost impossible. Not to mention it didn't make charging the flat batteries easy after we discovered they were flat in TRHC No.1, our little work horse 50Ton Whitcomb.

With our flat car arriving sans all 8 brasses on the axles, we couldn't move it until we had obtained and installed some, and of course, then we discovered that the lubricating pads were frozen solid, making it impossible to jack the car up enough to get the brasses in, leading to creative use of an oxy-propane torch to melt the pads. On top of that, we had discovered the axles weren't true in the journals, and all four axles were off-centre, as we discovered once 1/2 the brasses went in easily, and the other half not at all!!! Suffice to say, creative use of a 1/2 ton chain hoist and some loading straps allowed us to yank the truck side frames enough to get the brasses to go in!!



The reason for all of this, was that our two passenger cars, 12-Section CPR Sleeper Jackman and CPR "Cape" Series Solarium-Lounge Cape Race are being re-roofed to make them watertight so they can be stored outside without being wrapped in plastic (which was an issue in a public park as they were not presentable wrapped up). Jackman's roof is now complete, and so we needed to get it outside, and the flat car and box car inside so that we can re-organize our storage and supplies inside the box car, and re-deck the flatcar to provide storage for equipment from the Machine Shop. The new roof needs about a year for the mastic sealant to harden and age before we can paint the roof. The goal is to be able to paint the roof and re-paint the car in Tuscan Red with Canadian Pacific lettering to at least look great on the outside, and then we can turn our attention to the long list of needed repairs on the interior to make it fully presentable.



Despite our troubles Saturday, a warmish day above zero on Sunday allowed everything to work better, the journals relented and the packing melted enough to let us get the 4 brasses on with the axles shifted over, move everything about, and get everything shunted to its new position. It feels good to make progress, even if its only small steps. The video below shows the Box Car and Flat Car being shunted into the stalls:
[video=youtube;DiZyOw-DjIY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiZyOw-DjIY[/video]

More pictures:
Saturday - http://www.flickr.com/photos/55976115@N00/archives/date-taken/2011/02/12/
Sunday - http://www.flickr.com/photos/55976115@N00/archives/date-taken/2011/02/13/

And more Videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/DuctTape991?feature=mhsn

As always, full regular updates are on the TRHA News Blog: http://www.trha.ca/news.html

Cheers!!

Stephen