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Caption: A few years ago I posted a shot of this venerable old building, showing just the far end of it; taken 4 years previous to this one. Anytime during the day this shot would be into the sun; so, a dull day (my specialty) would have to do.
West Toronto CP station is gone now. It was built back in 1911; and saw its last passenger train when the Canadian was shifted over to CN in 1978.
There was a tug of war over this place. CP wanted it gone, the Heritage people wanted it saved; the City actually thought this would be a good place for something like a farmer's market.
Fed up, CP ordered a demolition crew in during the very wee hours of Thursday, November 25th, 1982; and they feverishly reduced the building to almost rubbish when a furious Toronto Mayor Art Eggleton arrived on the scene and promptly ordered the work stopped. He even phoned the CP Prez over the matter. But, Eggs was ignored and the place totaled by mid-morning. CP did get slapped with a "no demolition permit" charge, but it mattered little. No sooner than they cleaned the mess out, work was started on the third track for GO Transit, which was why the building had to go in the first place.
News of this station destruction made the front pages of newspapers but all that mattered to CP was that they got what they wanted.
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I think after that, the city of Toronto threatened to put the kybosh on redeveloping the downtown rail lands (that CP was involved in through their Marathon Realty arm). IIRC, the donation of John St. roundhouse downtown to the city may have been CP’s way of trying to make amends.
Such a shame! My dad has fond memories of that station and growing up in West Toronto.
Mr Dan..The City wanted to put the kybosh on redeveloping the railway lands? Well thats a polar opposite of the now! There was a nice golf course on the lands for a while.
Such a loss of a nice station. Thanks for the memory Mr Mooney as always.
CP offered to move it at their cost to the City of Toronto’s Carleton Park, just east of this site. The hysterical society objected, Eggleton’s assistant fumbled and CP v-p D’Alton Coleman tried to intervene, but the station came down. I later worked for CP and Eggleton, and I became good friends with D’Alt, whose grandfather had been the CPR’s president in the 1940s. I also reviewed the material in the CP files (some of it now in mine) and I can say there were folks at CP who cared and didn’t want it to end this way. The local idiots were the ones really to blame. The dummy heading this group said she wouldn’t approve of it being moved because then it wouldn’t be the West Toronto Station. You just can’t fix stupid. These folks also failed to do anything about the CN West Toronto station, which actually had more historical value than its larger CP cousin down Old Weston Road.
I went by West Toronto on an eastbound from London about 5 AM on the morning that station was demolished. They were already at work on the demo. A lot of the material was loaded into air dumps. At that time we used to stay in a bunkhouse in Toronto yard. The parking lot was on one side of the building & the hump track on the other. I ended up in a room on the hum side. About noon I woke up & looked out the window & some of those air dumps were already being pushed up to the hump. They got that demolition over with quickly & got out of there before too many irate people showed up.
As employees on CP, we always heard that the reason for the demolition, and also at Guelph Jct, was to permit re-alignment of the track to facilitate GO train service.