Caption: Old technology meets new - As an Engineer - to see the transformation of Waterloo Ontario over the last 15 years has been very welcome. I worked in Waterloo for 10 years and our company was a member of Communitech, where we met in the Perimeter Institute (PI) amongst other places to share ideas and best practices in the rapidly changing Tech industry. The building in the background is the institute, funded by technology magnate Mike Lazaridis who founded the once famous Research in Motion, creators of the Blackberry. When going to Lunch in the early days of my career, we'd often be next to Mike who favoured the same downtown Waterloo Queen St Vietnamese eatery we loved to go to, and as the tech industry grew, more buildings and condos have sprouted as companies grew ever larger. Dr. Stephen Hawking, a world renowned physicist has a chair at the Institute, to give you an idea of how world class this facility is - it is one of the top theoretical physics research centres in the world and it right here in CANADA. We should all be proud of this achievement!
And what does this have to do with trains? Well, here we have the technology that helped put Waterloo on the map, in it's day the Steam Engine was the 'technology' similar to the Internet of today - passing by PI, which will lead the way in new discoveries to help us create tomorrow's technology. Waterloo is in a major state of transformation, soon the LRT will run trams up and down this very line. While the Vietnamese restaurant may be gone, it's only just the beginning of Waterloo's transformation, but the Railway continues on as an important part of Waterloo's future.
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Note: The station in the foreground is the Waterloo St. Jacobs train station, built and used for the train which ran from 1997 to 1999, and re-purposes for the Waterloo Central from 2007 to 2015 until WCR was moved north to St. Jacobs permanently for LRT construction.
This structure has no other heritage as it’s a fairly modern building. I’ll share a photo of the former CNR Waterloo station next.. in a couple days.