Michigan Central Station

When driving into Detroit from Windsor over the Ambassador Bridge we have often puzzled at the identity of the abandoned multi-storey building off to the right, which seems to embody the sorry state of the once thriving Motor City. I have recently learnt that it's the shell of the Michigan Central Station, an architectural landmark built in 1913 and closed in 1987. Efforts to refurbish the old station have thus far been unsuccessful, stymied by the lack of available funds.



Here is a tour of the building made the year it closed:



I am not at all keen on the casino idea mentioned in the first video, but perhaps the example of LIUNA Station here in Hamilton offers some promise for MCS. This was the old Canadian National station on James Street north, which operated between 1931 and 1993. In 2000 it was reopened as a banquet hall by the Labourers' International Union of North America. Trains may once again use the station as part of a long-term transportation plan for Ontario's Golden Horseshoe, and a platform is being built to accommodate them. Detroiters should take note.

Neoclassical architecture

Paul M. Weyrich, of the Free Congress Foundation, is a fan, not only of rail transportation, but also of neoclassical architecture, as evidenced here: A Celebration of Railroads and Architecture. I am completely in agreement with him in his advocacy of train travel, which I am convinced needs to be favoured over air travel for short and intermediate distances. I am more ambivalent over his sweeping claim, following Prince Charles, that "classical architecture is a tribute to God Almighty."

Union Station, Washington, DC

I have been to Washington's Union Station at least twice, most recently in July of last year. It was designed by architect Daniel Burnham, well known for his contribution to the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 and his Plan of Chicago in 1909. I am pleased that this magnificent structure was successfully preserved and restored. Furthermore, I am happy to admit that all architecture is in some fashion a manifestation of God's creative intent that his image-bearing creatures should shape their environments in distinctive ways.

Yet architectural fashions also reflect the religious worldviews of the architects themselves, as well as of the larger culture that nurtures them. One looks in vain for Weyrich to recognize that neoclassicism in art and architecture was motivated by an effort more to recover the vaunted glories of pagan Greece and Rome than to honour God. Weyrich's conservatism could stand to be a bit more nuanced here.

Did you know. . .

. . . that the St. Charles Air Line is not an airline at all but a very short railway?

Tram travel back on track?

If conservative political activist Paul Weyrich had his way, we'd all be riding the streetcars again. As a former resident of Toronto, where I happily rode the subways and streetcars for two years without the burden of an automobile, I heartily agree. Of course, not all of his fellow conservatives, especially those of a libertarian bent, will approve, but many will. Here in Hamilton we can only hope that our own Hamilton Street Railway will once again live up to its name.

Urban transport and urban decay

Longtime residents of Toronto will recall the controversy over the abortive Spadina Expressway, as recounted in this article in the past weekend's National Post: Expressways Went Nowhere. I myself lived a stone's throw away from Spadina Avenue in 1978-79 and quickly learned that, had things gone differently a few years earlier, that unique neighbourhood, at the edges of Chinatown with a few Jewish textile vendors left over from earlier days, might not have been there at all. Had it succeeded, more would have come, making Toronto similar to comparably-sized American cities, crisscrossed with expressways bisecting urban neighbourhoods and destroying others. Plans for the Spadina ignited grassroots protest that eventually brought a halt to the project:

In 1971, new Ontario premier William Davis, facing a looming election, stood in the [Ontario] Legislature and announced the expressway would not be completed, declaring: "Cities were built for people and not cars."

[Adam] Vaughan says the decision had huge ramifications for the city. "Look at the American cities that built these huge expressways," he says. "They carved up their downtown neighbourhoods and those neighbourhoods died. The Spadina would've killed half a dozen neighbourhoods in this city -- the Annex, Cabbagetown, the Beaches. All these now vibrant, viable neighbourhoods would've just withered and died."

Queen Street, Toronto
Mid-1980s
Half a century ago my hometown of Chicago began building the first of the great expressways towards the west of the city's centre, initially named the Congress Expressway, subsequently to be called the Eisenhower Expressway. This massive public works project ostensibly followed one of the recommendations of Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago. The construction of the Congress necessitated razing the existing structures in its way, including the Garfield Park elevated train line. Among other things, this led to the death of a very fine electric interurban railway line, the Chicago Aurora & Elgin, that had run over the Garfield Park tracks towards the communities of the Fox River Valley. In short, the city's commitment to the expressways spelled a commitment to the automobile as a primary mode of transportation, at the expense of mass rail transit.

It may not be incidental that, at the very moment American cities were being paved over with expressways, these same cities began their inexorable decline. I have friends who grew up in the Englewood and the once heavily Dutch-American Roseland neighbourhoods on the south side of Chicago. These neighbourhoods are now given over to gangs and crack houses, and are no longer safe to live in. Whether the expressways were the cause is difficult to say, but they certainly did not help, as they made it easier for one-time residents to move to the suburbs and commute, taking their tax base with them. The city was effectively remade for the convenience of the suburbs.

Is Toronto a model of how to do things right? Not entirely. To be sure, when I lived there between 1978 and 1980, I could happily live without a car, relying on the subways, buses and streetcars — and, of course, my own feet — to get me where I wanted to go. Toronto had much less crime than Chicago and still does, though there is more now than when I lived there. Yet I am happy that the Spadina Expressway failed. The city would have been a different place if it had not, and I doubt it would have been for the better.

Still I could wish for more focus on mass transit for the entire Golden Horseshoe region. Especially if one lives outside Toronto in one of the "905" cities, it is next to impossible to get along without a motorized vehicle. Ontario's Liberal government has promised more funds to upgrade mass transit in this urban belt around Lake Ontario. We shall see what comes of this.

Here in Hamilton we have recently observed the tenth anniversary of the opening of the Lincoln Alexander Parkway (the "Linc"), which runs across Hamilton Mountain. Just six weeks ago the Red Hill Valley Parkway opened to connect the Linc to the Queen Elizabeth Way to the east of Hamilton. No neighbourhoods were destroyed to build the Linc, as the right of way was already vacant and apparently reserved for it for quite a number of years beforehand. The Red Hill, by contrast, was built through the Red Hill Creek Valley and thus came under fire from environmentalists. Given our admitted dependence on the automobile in Hamilton, both thoroughfares make sense. Yet I wish alternatives could have been found to enable people to travel without the ubiquitous and polluting internal combustion engine. This would require the expansion of GO train and bus service in and out of Hamilton, as well as more frequent buses from the inaptly-named Hamilton Street Railway. I am under no illusion that such measures would build Jerusalem in Ontario's green and pleasant land. Yet it might make for a more livable urban environment, from which we would all benefit.

By the way, a colleague of mine has alerted me to an apparent urban success story south of the equator: Curitiba. I may come back to the subject and post something more specific about this Brazilian city.

Another 50th anniversary


A half century ago today my favourite interurban railway abruptly ceased passenger service after 55 years of business. The Chicago Aurora & Elgin Railway began in 1902 when the original line was built between Chicago and Aurora, powered by electric third rail. In the next few years lines were extended to Elgin, Batavia, Geneva and St. Charles, all communities located along the Fox River. The lines branched out at my home town of Wheaton, the centre of operations and the location of the shops. Though most interurban railways were little more than trolley lines running alongside rural roads between towns, the CA&E was built to the standards of the steam lines and could thus attain higher speeds. While most interurbans flourished in the first two decades of the 20th century, only to founder after the Great War with the advent of the automobile, the CA&E, along with two other Chicago area interurbans, survived much longer, effectively becoming a suburban commuter line.


The CA&E was a precarious enterprise from the 1920s on, and it went through more than one receivership and reorganization over the decades. The Second World War years saw an increase in ridership, but ten years later it was struggling to remain afloat. In 1953 its entrance into Chicago over the Garfield Park elevated line was terminated to make way for the construction of the Congress (later Eisenhower) Expressway. Passengers from the Fox Valley suburbs had to get off at suburban Forest Park and transfer to the "L" for the remainder of the trip to Chicago. This was the final blow to the CA&E. Ridership plummeted and management petitioned to abandon passenger service. Permission finally came in the late morning of wednesday, 3 July 1957. Service was suspended a few minutes after noon, stranding passengers in the Loop, forcing them to find other ways home that evening. Freight service limped along for another two years. I recall seeing a CA&E freight train crossing Roosevelt Road in Wheaton when I was quite small. The railway was abandoned altogether in 1961.

A few CA&E cars are still operating at various railway museums around the United States, most notably the Fox River Trolley Museum and the Illinois Railway Museum (IRM). The CA&E right-of-way is now the Illinois Prairie Path, a recreational trail for jogging, hiking and bicycling. Here is a look at restored CA&E cars in action at the IRM:


Incidentally, the cessation of passenger service on the CA&E occurred only three days after my baptism.

Five years ago, to mark the occasion of the CA&E's centenary, I composed a song, titled The Great Third Rail Rag, after one of the railway's many nicknames. It is written in the style of Scott Joplin's rags, which were popular in the first years of the 20th century.

High speed railways

This week France's famous Train à grande vitesse (TGV) set a new speed record for rail transportation, clocking an impressive velocity of 574.8km/h (356mph), as seen immediately below:



As a lifelong railfan, I have a certain affection for trains of all sorts, but especially for electric railways, such as subways, trams and interurbans/radials. Would the Windsor-Québec corridor here in Canada benefit from the kind of high-speed rail service found in France and Japan? It would be expensive, to be sure, and it's possible that numbers of potential riders would not warrant it. But given that airport capacity cannot be expanded indefinitely and that there's only so much air space over a metropolitan urban centre, there is much to be said for at least improving passenger rail travel between cities separated by short or intermediate distances, such as Toronto and Ottawa or Québec and Montréal. Moreover, anything that would decrease the numbers of private automobiles, with their heavy use of nonrenewable energy resources and emission of air pollutants, on our roads is to be welcomed.

Travels through the Alleghenies

Our family just returned from just short of a week in Pennsylvania, where we were attending two family reunions, one for my wife's family and the other for mine. The first took us to Altoona, where my father-in-law was born and grew up and where a number of Nancy's cousins and an elderly aunt still live. Altoona is snuggled in the Allegheny Mountains, making for some spectacular scenery and a remarkable 19th-century engineering feat which we were privileged to see during our stay.

Nancy's great-great grandfather, Michael Henry Calvert (1809-1879), was one of the early settlers of Altoona and a grandson of Benedict Calvert of Mt. Airy Plantation, Maryland. We were able to locate his grave stone in the Fairview Cemetery. Two neighbourhoods in the city were named for him: Calvert Hills and Calvertville. My father-in-law grew up in this vicinity and gave us a guided tour, complete with memories of friends and relations and the houses in which they had once lived. Somewhat later in our travels Nancy was able to locate the cemetery where her 3rd great-grandfather, William Calvert (1770-1847), was buried. This was at St. Peter's Lutheran Church, near Newville.

Altoona is a railfan's paradise. The Pennsylvania Railroad dominated the life of the city for generations, and a number of my in-laws worked for the company in its heyday. It was long a competitor with the New York Central for the Chicago to New York run until it merged with its rival in 1968 to form the ill-fated Penn Central. In 1976 the PC merged with a number of other eastern US lines to form Conrail, which became the equivalent of what Canadians would call a Crown corporation until it was privatized some years later. Altoona residents nurture the memory of the PRR in a number of ways. We ourselves visited two associated landmarks. The first was Horseshoe Curve, a remarkable engineering feat completed in 1854 which allowed trains to make it up a particularly difficult stretch of the Allegheny Mountains. It is styled the "eighth wonder of the modern world." Over the Independence Day weekend just past festivities were planned to mark the 150th anniversary of the Curve, and Vice President Dick Cheney was expected to be present.


Railroaders Heritage Corporation

Horseshoe Curve

The following day we visited the Railroaders Memorial Museum, right downtown adjacent the railroad tracks. In addition to indoor exhibits there are quite a few old Pennsy cars and locomotives outdoors, all lovingly maintained by those dedicated to the memory of the late great railroad which provided transportation for Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries. There were apparently other rail-related sites in the area which we did not see.

From Altoona we drove southeast towards York, just north of the border with Maryland. Here we celebrated my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. Here too there is an historic railroad, which we nevertheless did not ride. This was the first time in a number of years that our extended family was together. I most enjoyed the music that is a feature of our family gatherings. My sister's lovely and talented daughters harmonized especially well. Remarkably, although I have written of the dangers posed by popular music to genuine folk music, we found ourselves singing some of the jazz standards of the 1930s and '40s, that is, the popular music of the day. As my brother-in-law is an accomplished bluegrass banjo player, we were delighted to hear him perform as well.

While in that part of the state, we drove through nearby Lancaster County, known as Pennsylvania Dutch (i.e., Deutsch) country. It is particularly known for its Amish residents and culture, reflected in the presence of horses and buggies and of farms lacking electrical power.

It was a successful trip in every way, but we're glad to be home again.

The human side of railways

Much as I am finding MS Train Simulator fascinating, and as realistic as its virtual world appears to be, it is missing something rather crucial: people! Although I myself am the supposed driver of the locomotive, the passenger cars are empty, and the automobiles buzzing by on adjacent roadways are curiously bereft of drivers. This virtual world is, in short, an eerily lifeless world, perhaps rather like that left by the detonation of a neutron bomb: it kills people but leaves buildings standing. This is not to say Train Simulator is not enjoyable; it is indeed. It is hard to equal the vivid sensation of moving from one point to another at high speeds.

Yet many railfans focus rather excessively on equipment. Much as the readers of Playboy or Penthouse (sorry, guys, no links!) focus narrowly on the physical characteristics of the undressed females on their pages, those collecting books and magazines about trains tend to neglect the human side of the railways. Even those working for the railways developed an entire industrial subculture that became the stuff of legends and folk songs. (Think of "Casey Jones" or "I've Been Working on the Railroad.") The early history of post-confederation Canada itself was to no small extent the story of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

For those old enough to remember, there was a palpable excitement in the air at a big-city railway terminal such as New York's Grand Central Station or Pennsylvania Station. The Chicago of my childhood had its Union Station, Northwestern Station, LaSalle Street Station, Dearborn Station, Grand Central Station and Central Station, all within a few city blocks of each other, with railways fanning out in all directions linking America's second city to the rest of the country and beyond. As children, two or three times a year my siblings and I would accompany my mother (and sometimes my father) to the LaSalle Street Station, famously overshadowed by the Chicago Board of Trade Building, where we would board a New York Central diesel-electric streamliner to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to visit my grandmother and other relatives. Everyone hurrying through these downtown terminal stations would have a story to tell: travelling to California on holiday, going to visit friends or relatives, picking up a loved one after a business trip, and so on. During the Second World War the railways were especially busy, with soldiers being transported to various and sundry places for purposes of national defence. How many couples would have kissed goodbye in those palatial and cavernous buildings, not knowing whether they would ever see each other again? These are poignant moments that I have come to attach to the last golden age of the railways, which extended into my own childhood, but not much beyond.


Grand Central Station, New York

Airports are simply not the same. Air travel takes one to his or her destination fairly quickly. One hardly has time actually to settle into an airline trip, unless one is flying overseas. But part of the excitement of long distance rail travel comes from the sense of anticipation of a long journey, and hours ahead to fill with reading, eating in the dining car, enjoying a drink or two in the club car, taking in the scenery, and possibly retiring to sleeping quarters in a Pullman car. A transcontinental train was like a hotel or resort on wheels, where one could get a haircut or a three-course meal, enjoy conversation with newly-found friends, or even, like Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, find romance.

There is, of course, no way a computer simulation could possibly replicate such an experience. So I'll enjoy it for what it is, despite its limitations, and be content to remember the real thing.

Trains, trains, trains

I do not know much about computer games, and I generally avoid reading blogs that are heavily devoted to the subject. However, as a railfan, I've recently discovered one which is pretty nifty: Microsoft Train Simulator. Although the visuals are not exactly high resolution, it does an amazing job of putting one right inside the cab of several different kinds of locomotives, including steam, electric and diesel-electric. The routes are laid out in remarkable detail, even showing period automobiles, typical landscapes and buildings alongside the tracks. Six routes are included: the Marias Pass in Montana, Washington to Philadelphia, the Orient Express through the Austrian Alps, the Midland Railway in England between Carlisle and Settle, and two Japanese routes between Tokyo and Hakone, and between Yatsushiro and Yoshimatsu. One can choose a number of vantage points, both internal and external to the train, all controlled from the computer keyboard. My favourite internal view is of the club car on the Orient Express, complete with a smouldering cigarette, ceiling fans and background music.

If I could add some routes to a future edition, I would love to see:

(1) Twentieth Century Limited, New York Central's famous New York-Chicago train which ran between 1902 and 1967 (and featured in Alfred Hitchcock's great film, North by Northwest). I would choose the segment between Chicago and Elkhart, Indiana and set the action in 1948.

(2) Orient Express between Sofia, Bulgaria, and Constantinople, with the domes of Hagia Sophia in the background. I would choose 1910, when there was still a substantial Greek presence in The City and the Ottomans were still in charge.

(3) Chicago Aurora & Elgin, the electric interurban railroad that operated between 1902 and 1957 and went through my hometown of Wheaton, Illinois. I would choose 1951 as the year and cover the entire line, which is not very long.

(4) South Africa's famous Blue Train (die Bloutrein), running between Cape Town and Pretoria, perhaps around 1960 and covering the stretch from Cape Town that climbs the Hex River Pass. (No, I've not been there, but I have seen Great Railway Journeys of the World.)

(5) For Canadian content, either a Canadian Pacific transcontinental, somewhere in the Rockies, or Algoma Central's Agawa Canyon tour train northwards from Sault Sainte Marie. Time period negotiable, but the latter must be in September or October.

Visit to the States

Nancy and Theresa and I just got back from our annual visit to family in Michigan and Illinois. We had a great time. I will not bore readers with every little thing we did. But there were a few highlights worth mentioning:

- A personal tour of my uncle's collection of antique tractors at his farm near Dundee, Michigan.

- A visit to the recently refurbished Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. My favourite exhibits here were the Great Train Story and the Pioneer Zephyr. (I am a railfan, after all.) Theresa liked Colleen Moore's Fairy Castle and the Idea Factory.

- A visit to the Fox River Trolley Museum, where they've extended their trackage south to the Blackhawk Forest Preserve. Afterwards we stopped for Tastee Freez ice cream, something I remember fondly from my childhood.

- A big fat Greek dinner at my aunt and uncle's house, including two kinds of souvlakia, string beans and kolokithia (zuchini), kidney bean salad, tsatsiki, and what is arguably the world's greatest beer, Pilsner Urquell, brewed in the Czech Republic. The highlight of the evening had us all dancing to nostalgic Greek songs I had last listened to some 30 or 35 years ago. (Theresa loved this part. "I'm having a wonderful time," she beamed to her great aunt in the middle of a two-step.)

- Several violent storms passing through the area, making for heavy downpours, high standing water, downed tree branches, but cooler than normal temperatures.

- Patio seating at a restaurant, which we enjoyed due to the mild temperature.

- Arriving back home again after ten days on the road.