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Transporting Toronto

Located just north of the city’s busy waterfront and steps from the CN Tower and SkyDome is the ancient CP Roundhouse. Where Canadian Pacific Railway’s mighty steam engines were once serviced, the folks at Steam Whistle Brewery now turn out a tasty Pilsner.

While it’s good to see somebody occupying what was just another abandoned historic building, a brewery certainly wasn’t what many of us hoped would be the fate of the old structure that was constructed in 1929 on the site of Canadian Pacific’s first Toronto roundhouse.

Steam engines continued to be serviced in this unique building for more than half a century with the huge doors closing for good in 1986. After the building’s closure, I remember attending meeting after meeting during which a multitude of interested and well-meaning people discussed a whole bunch of ideas that might bring the old building back to life. Some believed that an operating steam railway museum would be the perfect re-use while others, myself included, thought that it would be a great place to tell the much broader story of Canada’s fascinating transportation history.

Our plan would include, but not be limited to, just the era of steam. Showing the world what Canadians have done on land and sea and in the air would, we believed, do more to maximize visitations and increase income.

Souvenir postcard of the Toronto-built passenger steamer SS Kingston. Note the biplane overhead.

But those discussions ultimately went for naught when in the late spring of 2000 Steam Whistle began brewing operations in the roundhouse. Since that time any ideas to use the rest of the building for museum purposes seem to have been deleted from the old building’s future role in Toronto.

That’s unfortunate because there’s quite a story to tell. Any plan to tell the country’s transportation story in a roundhouse setting certainly wouldn’t lack for content. In fact, you could use all of the building’s massive interior space just to tell the story of Toronto’s contributions to that fabulous story.

For instance, here are just two events that took place in Toronto on January 19, the day I originally wrote this column, that prove my point.

It was on a cold January 19, 1901, that one of the finest passenger lake boats ever seen on the Great Lakes was launched in Toronto. And on that same date, a mere 49 years later, the first all-Canadian fighter jet designed and built in this country took to the skies out at the Avro Canada plant northwest of Toronto.

There is no question that January 19 was, and remains, a special day in the history of transportation in Ontario’s capital.

The steamer Kingston was built for the Richelieu and Ontario Navigation Company (R&O) by the Bertram Engineering Works whose shipyard was located at the foot of Bathurst Street. The factory where parts of the great ship were fabricated is now occupied, in part, by the exotic car dealership at the northeast corner of Front and Bathurst. The finished components were transported across the railway tracks, down to the waterfront where they would be fitted together in time to create a fine new passenger ship, the 290-foot-long SS Kingston, which was powered by an inclined, three-crank, triple-expansion steam engine that ran a pair of 23-foot-diameter side paddlewheels. Kingston operated on the Toronto–Thousand Islands–Prescott run. At that last port most passengers would transfer to other ships for the thrilling ride through the Lachine Rapids and onwards to Montreal.

However, following the tragic and deadly fire of September 17, 1949, that destroyed SS Noronic while at its berth in Toronto, Canada Steamship Lines (the successor to the R&O) decided to end all passenger ship service. The once-proud Kingston was retired from service and eventually scrapped.

Interestingly, even while this Toronto-built vessel awaited its fate, another creation from the hands of a new generation of local craftsman was about to make Canadian aviation history. With the world immersed in the uncertainties of the Cold War, the Royal Canadian Air Force was searching for a new aircraft to replace its outdated collection of piston-engine Mustangs and Sea Furies and pioneer Vampire jets. What was needed was an all-purpose, all-weather, twin-engine jet fighter.

Avro Canada’s second CF-100, FB-K, designed and built at the company’s suburban Toronto factory.

Officials looked at a number of jets designed and built by Americans, but decided our people could do as well or even better. This decision, one that was derided at the time by several so-called experts, would result in Avro Canada’s remarkable CF-100, the first of which flew January 19, 1950.

In total, 692 CF-100s were built at the Malton, Ontario, factory. Interestingly, even after 30 years had passed since that first flight, several of the aircraft were still active as electronic warfare trainers. One CF-100 has even been honoured in the form of a permanent monument in a park-like setting on Derry Road East (near Goreway Drive), just a short distance from its birthplace.

To learn more about this Canadian aviation success story (and one that could have been a feature attraction in Canada’s transportation story in the CP Roundhouse) read The Avro CF-100 by Larry Milberry from CANAV Books.

January 19, 2003

* After the sale of SkyDome to Rogers Communications in early 2005, the name of the stadium was quickly changed to Rogers Centre.