Between Darkness & Light | Canadian Northern Railway Eastern Line Locomotive Shop

This isn’t the first time this location has appeared on the blog, I featured it back in August 2022 during my big Railway project. But that was in the context of its railway history so it is only fair that I share my personal history with this location as an urban exploration. What makes this location important is that it was one of the first locations I was able to fully trace its history from start to current using a piece of paper and the Internet. And second I successfully captured a 4×5 sheet of this building less than an hour after finding out I was going to be a dad in the next year.

Our story starts in Manitoba; in 1899, Sir William MacKenzie and Sir Douglas Mann consolidated several defunct and bankrupt railways in the province into a single charter, the Canadian Northern Railway (CNoR). While spreading through Manitoba, the two men envisioned their line running from coast to coast. They presented the plan to the Canadian government in Ottawa. Ottawa thought this was a good idea as the only transcontinental line was operated by Canadian Pacific (CPR) and suggested that CNoR work with Grand Trunk Railway (GTR), which was already planning to build such a line. The two companies flat-out refused to work together, and each went about building separate lines, with Grand Trunk chartering Grand Trunk Pacific (GTP). Canadian Northern with funding from the government and the Canadian Bank of Commerce. Spreading out construction heading east and west, the CNoR line arrived in Capreol in 1906 and turned south towards Toronto. The line would come in 1910, and CNoR arranged a sharing agreement with GTR to use their line into Union Station from the north to allow them access to Union Station. But if the company was to continue their push east, it needed a large maintenance yard in the north. Canadian Pacific already had a presence here in the form of Leaside Junction. There was a push to build a planned community. CNoR, despite being deep in debt to the government and the banks, purchased a large swath of land to build a maintenance yard and a planned community. Arranging for noted Montreal architect Fredrick Todd to design the model town, the purchase was completed in 1912, and construction began a year later. The central feature of the yard is a sizeable ten-bay locomotive shop, including a massive crane that could lift the largest locomotive in the fleet. A powerhouse, paint shop, car shop, machine shop, roundhouse and turntable rounded out the massive array of trackage. The town took the name Leaside after one of the earliest settlers in the area, William Lea. In 1915, construction finished on the entire line of the CNoR, which reached from Vancouver to Montreal, beating out Grand Trunk Pacific (which wouldn’t be completed until 1919). A year later, the Toronto yards opened with great fanfare. Yet, despite having a long stretch of rail, the line failed to make any profit; even with the branch lines through Saskatchewan and the rich wheat-producing regions, the small fraction did not offset the massive construction costs. With threats of solvency growing and a war taking place in Europe, the Federal Government did not want to lose a significant piece of infrastructure (despite CPR doing much of the heavy lifting in the West during the war). In 1917, the company was folded into Canadian Government Railway (CGR), a holding company for defunct railways. CGR would extensively use the know-how and trackage of CNoR to operate the other railways in the CGR. In 1919, GTP joined the growing list of railways operated by CGR; they were joined quickly by GTR itself. The massive influx transformed CGR into the Canadian National Railway (CNR, today CN) in 1923.

Now overloaded with trackage, rolling stock and property, the relatively small Leaside yard would be more of a duplication thanks to the massive railway facilities closer to Union Station. However, the strategic position allowed the yard to continue operating for the next decade until a modern roundhouse was completed in 1927, near where the CN Tower stands today. The opening of the Spadina Roundhouse and other massive maintenance facilities made Leaside redundant, and it would close in 1931. CNR would begin to sell off parcels of land over the next several years due to the growing industrial demands in Leaside. In 1932, a Canadian E.S. & A Robinson branch incorporated and looked for property to build a new paper production factory. The corporation would purchase the section of the former CNoR yards that housed the locomotive shop and begin constructing a new factory next to the former shops, opening in 1935. While paper production was done at the main plant, the old locomotive shop made for an ideal warehouse. The paper plant would soon expand as the decades wore on. E.S & A Robinson would change hands several times before becoming part of Winpak, a paper company out of Montreal that formed in the 1970s. The exact history is blurry at this point. Production at Leaside continued into the 21st Century before the doors closed in 2005. A demolition order was issued shortly after that. The city, realising that at the core of the modern factory was one of only a few surviving buildings from the CNoR yards, applied a Heritage designation to the shops in 2006. The modern factory was knocked down, leaving only the locomotive shops. Thankfully, plans were already in motion to revitalise the area with construction starting in 2011; a significant commercial development would begin to surround the old shops while they underwent restoration and renovation, persevering the exterior elements to open as a Longos in 2012.

Despite being overall a dull location, there was never any real excitement in getting inside and the location itself offered up little more than the big empty. I honestly cannot remember anything about both my trips here in 2008 and 2010. The only difference is that in 2008 there was a lot more inside the location and in 2010 the entire section with the massive locomotive doors was covered in graffiti. It was a relatively easy location to get into, the one thing I do remember is that in 2008 we could still access one of the older sections of the original ES&A Robinson factory, at least the basement and by 2010 the entire place had been filled in. But the one thing I do remember well about this location is figuring out what it used to be and that was thanks to the pile of documents left up on the second floor. And I’m glad I grabbed one piece because it contained two things, a name (ES&A Robinson) and an address. Now this was still 2008 and early days of the Internet as a source for research with many governments starting the process of digitising their historical records. From there I was able to build a much larger picture of what the place was and its history beyond being a warehouse for Winpack as many in the UrbEx community knew it as because that is what the place presented itself. But this place is unique in my own story because my experience goes beyond urban exploration as it was the first place to grab a post photo walk beer in 2013 at the first Toronto Film Shooters event and then again in 2021 it was the first sheet I shot after finding out I was going to be a dad.

It’s hard to see any growth when you have only visited a location a couple of times, but in the case of this shop, there is an apparent change between trips one and two. The two biggest takeaways are that from the first to the second, there were changes in my editing style in helping clean up the colour cast from the interior to something far cleaner, and the second embraced the use of ultra-wide angle lenses. Not only on my crop-sensor D300 but using it to the full potential on my F80. The one trouble with that second trip and using slide film to capture the interior was that I should have done something to adjust the colour with the film images after scanning. Also, the scanning job is pretty terrible compared to what I work with today. I still needed to improve my skills by scanning my work, understanding, and equipment. The one thing that remained the same between the two trips was my composition; I had those clear leading lines even with the images that were not dead-centre compositions.

One of my favourite aspects of the locomotive shops is that the building still stands today. Unlike many abandoned buildings I have explored, it doesn’t end with demolition or remain abandoned. While still having access to an impressive abandoned building, I would much rather see these pieces of location history see use, even in a new way. Plus, if you visit the Longo’s, you can see some images hanging from the roof inside of what the place used to look like both during its days as a locomotive shop and as an abandoned building. Sadly, there are no surviving online images of the E.S. & A Robinson factory’s appearance when it was first completed or how the site looked during the final days under Winpak. You, however, can see images of what the area looked like while it was a railway yard. And there is more to that yard that survives; in addition to the locomotive shop, there is also a surviving powerhouse, today is a landscaping firm’s office, and several surviving walls of buildings that are now part of the smaller units in the surrounding complex of shops. You can see the entire collection of photos over on Flickr.