By Gregory Clark, August 6, 1927.
The test of civilization, is whether you can get from your house to your berth in the Montreal flyer1 without getting wet.
At Birdseye Centre, Hamilton, Orillia, Waubashene, if it is raining, you get wet.
You know at once that you are not in a metropolis. For you have to stand out on the station platform and let her rain.
One thing that could be said about the Old Union Station2 is that it was metropolitan. From your side drive to your berth in the sleeper you enjoyed the full fruits of civilization. You kept dry.
The tragical announcement that we are now working up to is that for the next couple of years Toronto is not going to be a metropolis. Waubashene, Myrtle, Petrolia can all give Toronto the merry laugh of sisterhood.
For with the final switch-over from the Old to the New Union Station Toronto is going to find itself standing out on the platform in the good old-fashioned way.
Raincoats, fur coats, umbrellas and mufflers will now be the essential tools for catching a train. There are winter nights ahead when Toronto will sigh for the good Old Union Station with its roof.
This is bad news for Toronto, we know. After all the years of waiting, after all the official openings of the New Station by Mr. Church and Mayor Foster and everybody that wanted their names inscribed in enduring stone, it will be a shame to discover that the New Union Station. for quite a while at any rate, will be just a magnificent waiting-room. For all practical purposes, such as catching trains, you will go in one door out of the wet and out the other door into the wet.
Those of us who still think that we are going to have a station a la New York or London or Chicago, where you find the trains pulled up and waiting practically in the drawing-room, are going to be disappointed.
We’ll Be Out in the Open
The Old Union Station is not being torn down because we are about to move into the New Union Station. It is being destroyed because the viaduct is going to crash through it. We are going into the New Union Station only because we are losing the old one.
In other words, our move into the famous New Union Station is in the nature of a temporary expedient.
The viaduct is a vast elevated road of solid concrete about as wide as a ball park. On it, some day, the train tracks will be laid so that you and I may motor under it rather than constantly dispute the way with the trains. They have completed the viaduct back of the new station. But there are no tracks on it. It has been completed in this short block so that we won’t have to go back to the Old Union Station later when they wish to build the viaduct behind the New Union Station.
So for a couple of years, nobody knows how long, we will emerge from the back door of the New Union Station, walk across the wide cement viaduct, descend temporary steps to the same old ground level we are using to-day, and get on our trains from a temporary plank pavement, and from beneath narrow high roofs, also temporary, that are laid, like long arbors, between each set of tracks.
If you look eastward the next time you are out in the open at what used to be the Old Union Station, but is now a strange and unfamiliar pile of tattered old buildings, you will see the steps and stairways being built where we will walk out over the viaduct and down to the trains. Unquestionably, they will be covered steps. Unquestionably the plank platform amongst the tracks will be sheltered as best it can be with narrow temporary roofs. But it would only be quibbling with Coboconk3 and Port Hope to say that we will not be out in the open.
Furthermore, it will be a long haul for hand-baggage. There Bowmanville will have it on us. Because at Bowmanville you just drive up to the platform and there you are.
But the red caps will probably make a great killing during the years Toronto has to walk over its viaduct. From Front street, where you have to get out of your taxicab, to the far edge of the viaduct, where you commence the steps down to the train tracks, it will be twice as far as it is now, under the tunnel.
In the New Union Station – Toronto’s magnificent new waiting-room – you can get any number of things. You can get an eyefull. You can breathe. You can get lunch, have your hair cut, get a beauty treatment, buy books, a soda, drugs. In the dining-room you can dance. But you can’t get a train.
If It Rains We’ll Get Wet
They are nibbling the old station away.
The next time you go down to the station you won’t know the old place. And if it is raining, as it most likely will be, you will get wet..
Never more will you take the Montreal flyer from Track 3. Track 3 is only a parking place for coaches now.
The old roof – the one we bade good-by for the first time many a year ago, is gone. Suddenly, at last, it is gone. And several hundred outraged pigeons flutter about the ancient towers we never saw before, wondering what the dickens men keep putting things up for only to pull them down.
The towers that are revealed now – and soon they will be nibbled away – are surprisingly stately. We had no idea they were there. If we had known what a cathedral style the Old Union Station really had, perhaps we wouldn’t have. spoken so rudely of it, the last couple of generations. But the great canopies over the tracks hid the towers. Hid the station. It was the canopies we did not like, after all.
The viaduct is ready to be shoved through the old station. It is now right up against the east end of the doomed pile. When it starts to move it will smash right into the towers, right across Track 3 and crush to flinders that old staircase we used to wind down in a great hurry; and the old dim restaurant with its glass covered sandwiches.
So out beyond, far beyond old Track 6 which was the uttermost limits we had to go even when bound for North Bay, they have spread huge pavements of planks, and all over the place are signs directing you to Track 7, Track 8 and even Track 9!
These plank pavements run away to the eastward, in back of the New Union Station. You can see staircases being built up into space. You can see dinky little narrow shelters being erected all along the tracks, We know what it means.
The switch-over from the Old to the New is going to take place soon – before, they hope, the crush of homing holidayers and Exhibition visitors. They are working up to that peak now. The viaduct having marched right up to the eastern edge of the old station, three tracks, the first three, have had to be closed, and are now used for parking only. They have therefore taken some of the freight tracks from beyond the outermost of the old passenger tracks. When your train is on Track 9 you begin to think Toronto is getting to be a big girl now. Some of the older folks don’t like it, however.
“Track 9!” exclaimed an old lady with several bundles. “Good gracious, how far is that!”
“Just through the archway, lady, and across that platform.”
“Why on earth don’t they leave things alone? Always changing things, until a body hardly knows where to turn!” growled she.
A Theatre of Real Drama
When you tamper way so delicate an organization as a railway-terminal, there are bound to be consequences, like repairing a clock, and having a couple of wheels left over. But they are getting on very nicely. Perhaps the trains are not made up quite so early as they used to be. The result is, it is not the passengers but the mail, express and baggage lads who do the most worrying. Each of these departments has half a dozen truck loads of bags and boxes and trunks to rush aboard when the train pulls in. Maneuvering the trucks against each other and in the narrow lanes between the tracks – for borrowed freight tracks have not the space between them that regular passenger tracks have – it’s quite a job. All postmen think the mails are more important than express, and what the baggage men think about the urgency of baggage would warm the heart of a passenger. When your train is made up and you have a few minutes to spare stroll up forward and listen to the boys trying to adhere to that regulation of the railroads which reads that profane language on the part of employes will not be tolerated. Has his majesty’s mail right of way over the personal baggage of his majesty, the traveling citizen? And if express costs so much more than the carriage of either mail or baggage, should not express get priority, and so give its money’s worth?
The switch-over itself will take place without ostentation. The last train will be made up in the old station. The last passenger will hurry, staggering under his bags, down the dim underneath tunnel. The last “All aboard” will ring out mournfully in the upstairs waiting-room with its high reverberating ceiling. And from then on the taxis and the private cars will call at the handsome pillared main doorway of the New Union Station. All is being got in readiness. The ticket sellers will be in cages like bank tellers. The information girls and boys will be in their circle out in the middle of the vast floor of the new waiting-room. The telegraph desks, the lunch counters, all will be manned as if by magic. For the people who have the parts to play have been studying their parts and the scenery has been set for six years.
Everybody who wants to say good-by to the Old Union Station should do so without delay. There should be some ceremony of farewell. For all its shabbiness, the Old Station had tremendous sentimental significance. It was the first glimpse of home, the last glimpse of home. It is hallowed by a million farewells, a billion kisses of parting and of restoration. It has been the theatre of countless dramas, tragic and comic. In this tattered old theatre the boys said good-by for the South African war. Its walls rang with “Johnny Canuck” and the city thrilled as the train bearing two, three, four hundred heroes pulled slowly out. That was drama. But it was the same old theatre that heard no songs at all when hundreds and hundreds, thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, in endless trains, in trains running on priority orders, went steaming unromantically eastward again, and leaden footed girls and women and elderly men walked slowly out of the old station to go home and wait interminably for yellow telegrams which started “His Majesty regrets to inform you…”
The little boys who have carried their toy pails and sand shovels through the old station are grown to men who have carried their bags and despatch cases through the same old gate.
Young people who passed through it on the springing feet of youth have come back through it with failing steps or in boxes.
A theatre of the true drama of life, more than any other single building in the city, it has taken part in the happiest moments of the people. The setting forth to adventure, the coming home.
And one day, within the next few weeks, suddenly, in accordance with a notice fastened to its front, it will be left flat.
Editor’s Notes:
- The Montreal Flyer (also known as the Green Mountain Flyer), was regular train service between Montreal and the Northeast United States, with sections to New York City and Boston. It started in 1892, and was discontinued in 1953. ↩︎
- This article is about the transition in the building of the third Union Station in Toronto. On the date of the article, although the station was incomplete, its building was complete and the station was opened by Prince Edward, Prince of Wales. Four days later, the track network was shifted from the second Union Station, while the new viaduct, concourse and train shed were under construction. Demolition of the second Union Station began almost immediately and was completed in 1928. The third Union Station project was not fully completed until 1930. ↩︎
- Coboconk is a village in the Kawartha Lakes. ↩︎
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