8/23/2023 0 Comments Platform at union stationThe Northern Railway followed suit, opening its own station behind City Hall (now the St. In 1866, the Great Western decided to build its own station and opened a four-track structure near Yonge Street. The first Union Station would not last, however. The street remains to this day, long after stations on the site were demolished. The street directly in front of the building was named Station Street. The building was located between Simcoe and York Streets (closer to York Street), one block south of Front Street. Toronto's first official Union Station came about when the Grand Trunk Railway opened a new facility to the public in May 1858 and invited the Great Western Railway (which had arrived late in 1855) and the Northern Railway to join as tenants. It would soon build its own station just east of the OS&H station near the corner of Bay and Front. (Service to Montreal would begin on October 27, 1856.) The Grand Trunk Railway connected its eastern and western lines in 1857 and received access to the Ontario, Simcoe & Huron station that year. The western line opened first in July 1856, followed by the eastern line to Oshawa in August 11 of the same year. The eastern station, located on the east bank of the Don River, served trains from Montreal, while the western station, located at Queen's Wharf near Bathurst Street, served trains heading to such exotic western destinations as Guelph and Sarnia. Three years after the railway (known as the Northern Railway after 1858 the line was extended to Allandale in 1853 and later to Meaford) built its line to Aurora, the Grand Trunk arrived in Toronto and built lines to the east and the west, each served by separate stations. The first revenue passenger train to leave Toronto's waterfront was a little steam engine named "Toronto" pulling a passenger train on the Ontario, Simcoe & Huron Railway on May 16, 1853. Toronto's current Union Station is actually the city's third such station, and only one of a multitude of railway stations that were built between Parliament and Bathurst Streets along Toronto's waterfront. The term describes a station where a number of railroads share space, as opposed to each railway having its own central station for that city. Union stations can be found in many cities across North America. In the meantime, this article provides the context of what has come before, to illustrate how far the station has come, and how much farther it is about to go. The details of those changes are worthy of an article all their own, which you will access soon. As of this writing (July 2014), Union Station has been undergoing renovations that substantially alter its configuration and capacity as well as its appearance. And this particular article stops at the year 2000. It describes how its importance to the city of Toronto has shifted in the nearly ninety years since it was built. This article details the history of Toronto's Union Station, discussing not only the building itself, but its predecessors. It is also hard to believe that the building was once slated for demolition. With so many people passing through the station each day, and with plans afoot to expand the station's capacity to handle even more passengers in the future, it's easy to forget the storied history and the architectural grandeur of this landmark. In addition to the trains of GO Transit and VIA Rail, there is the Toronto subway, buses using GO Transit's inter-city terminal next to the station, and rail links to the Ferry Docks south of the station and, coming in 2015, to Pearson International Airport itself. Just about every mode of transportation is represented at Union Station. It is a gateway into the city not only for people coming into work from the suburbs of the Greater Toronto Area, but tourists and other visitors from Montreal, Ottawa, New York and places farther afield. In 2004, when this article was first published on Transit Toronto, the facility was part of the daily routine of 200,000 weekday commuters, compared to just 80,000 passengers who used Pearson International Airport each day. Today, Toronto's Union Station is, by far, the city's most important public transportation hub.
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