Canada's 'Railway City' wants passenger trains back. Like much of the country, it's not so simple

What happened to Canada's 'Railway City?'

To an outsider, the 3.2-hectare sea of grass surrounding the Elgin County Railway Museum in the heart of St. Thomas, Ont., might look like an urban park. That's not what Wil Zufelt sees.

To him, it's an enormous open wound.

"You say green space," he said. "We're actually sitting in the middle of a brownfield site that was left behind from the railroads."

Built in 1913, the hulking red-brick building was once the Michigan Central Railway Locomotive Shops, where locomotives were maintained and overhauled by a staff of 400 workers. It's one of three survivors of a sprawling railway complex that once had 112 buildings.

The old building is now a museum, but it can't welcome visitors. It's literally crumbling. The city engineer ordered it closed after finding its walls were bowing and its ceiling was unsafe.

"People need to wake up," Zufelt said. "Pay attention to what we're losing."

The former Michigan Central Railway Locomotive Shops sit on 3.2 hectares of former railway lands in St. Thomas, Ont. Built in 1913, the building is now home to the Elgin County Railway Museum, but is closed to the public because of structural concerns. (Patrick Morrell/CBC News)Zufelt heads Railworks, the organization behind three of St. Thomas's surviving railway landmarks. He's launching a campaign to raise $8 million to save and restore the former locomotive shops.

The goal is to turn the old locomotive shops into not just a museum, but an active gathering place at the centre of a redeveloped downtown.

"I want it to be more than alive. I want it to be the centre of St. Thomas," he said. "That's what success is, is putting a heartbeat back in the core and then you have your arteries and everything pumps out from the middle."

By 1914, eight railways converged on St. Thomas, bringing more than 100 trains through the southwestern Ontario city every day. Its location made it a major hub for American rail traffic between Detroit and Buffalo and between New York and Chicago. The cross-border connection was so important, at one point, St. Thomas even had a U.S. consulate.

Today, the community that calls itself the "Railway City" has no rail connection at all.

The railways are long gone, but their remains are scattered across the city — empty lots filled with rubble from where railway buildings once stood, abandoned shunting yards, railway spikes that turn up like seashells on a beach and tracks that snake everywhere and nowhere.

The old London to Port Stanley Railway runs past a restored station in St. Thomas before it abruptly ends — disappearing into the grass of a residential neighbourhood.

A section of railway track ends abruptly in St. Thomas, Ont., where a missing connection has been under a federal order to be restored by CN since 1990. Across Canada, communities looking to revive passenger rail are confronting what remains after decades of decline. (Colin Butler/CBC News)The missing connection was the subject of a 1990 federal transport order requiring CN to replace the missing diamond at its own expense once the line reached CN tracks. But the physical connection was never completed.

Today, part of the former route is blocked by a parking lot enclosed by a fence.

The Canadian Transport Agency told CBC News the order remains in effect and CN's obligation would still apply if the physical connection were made.

CN did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

St. Thomas is an unusually stark example of what happened in communities across Canada as the railway era receded, according to Thomas Blampied, a historian who studied Canada's railway history at the University of Toronto.

The former Canada Southern Railway Station in St. Thomas, Ont., is one of the surviving landmarks from an era when the city was one of Canada's busiest railway centres. The 1873 building is one of three remaining historic railway buildings in a community that once had 112. (Colin Butler/CBC News)"Cars started to eat away at passenger revenue from railways and trucks started to take some of the freight traffic," he said.

As passengers moved to cars and freight moved to trucks, railways abandoned increasingly unprofitable routes. They didn't simply stop running trains. Much of the infrastructure was removed with them.

"Do we keep the infrastructure — so the track, all the signals, all the crossing warnings — do we keep it all intact?" Blampied said. "Increasingly, the answer was no."

In some cases, the rails were sold for scrap, in many cases, he said, "it made economic sense to completely withdraw."

But even where the railway lines survived, the network changed.

Anthony Perl, a transportation policy expert at Simon Fraser University, said railways removed passing tracks and other infrastructure once passenger trains disappeared, reshaping the network around the needs of freight.

The Northern Ontario tourism sector are hoping the return of the Northlander passenger train will help bring more people to the region. (Submitted by Ontario Northland)"We had a great streamlining, or right-sizing, or value engineering, pick your term — of the national rail infrastructure in Canada as passenger trains went away," Perl said. "To optimize it for long, slow freight trains."

He said that matters now because Canada is trying to put passenger trains back on a network that, in many places, was either removed or rebuilt for another purpose.

In Ontario, the province is preparing to restore Northlander passenger service between Toronto and northeastern Ontario, more than a decade after it was cancelled. The federal government meanwhile, is developing Alto, a new high-speed passenger railway between Toronto and Quebec City that would run largely on its own tracks.

Other communities are pushing for passenger rail to return, including on Vancouver Island, in Alberta between Calgary and Banff and in Cape Breton.

But Canada's railways have something airlines and trucking companies don't: control over the infrastructure they use.

Abandoned freight cars sit on overgrown tracks in a former shunting yard in St. Thomas, Ont., one of the remnants of the city's once sprawling railway network that linked major North American cities. (Colin Butler/CBC News)"No one is going to build an alternative set of rails across this country under any circumstances," Perl said. "That's why they make the call on whether to put in or take out tracks in particular places."

In St. Thomas, CN has yet to restore the missing connection between London and Port Stanley.

"Even when the Canadian Transportation Agency orders them to do something they don't want to do," he said, "it can take quite a while, if ever, that they will go along with it because they have the ownership of that infrastructure."

Perl argues that kind of power has deep roots in the railway business and points to language the industry has given us.

"To 'railroad someone' is to take advantage and treat someone unfairly or unjustly," he said. "You don't see that with too many other industries."

Colin Butler is based in London, Ont., where he reports for Ontario and national audiences. He covers investigative, science, public policy and government accountability with a particular interest in using public records to uncover hidden stories.