There have been some form of electric streetcars or trams operating in Toronto since 1892. Initially they were under the auspices of the Toronto Railway Company; the Toronto Transportation Commission (now the Toronto Transit Commission or the TTC) took over in 1920 and has continued to operate the streetcars / trams / light rail vehicles since then.
September 30, 2021 is the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Canada had 140 federally run Indian Residential Schools from 1831 to 1998, and the harm caused by these schools reverberates today. This day was created to honour the children of residential schools, their families and communities.
I was in Moncton, New Brunswick recently for business. After that was concluded, I headed to the Fredericton-Oromocto area to visit my mom. I hadn’t seen her since December 2019 due to COVID travel restrictions. I spent Friday afternoon and evening with her, then headed out around 9 PM. I was still internally on Manitoba … Read more
Steve burst into the kitchen, slamming the screen door behind him. As he stomped past his mother, up to her elbows in greasy dishwater, she cried out, “Hey! Improve your attitude!”
Occasionally I get an email from someone who needs some historical railway information. Sometimes it’s an author trying to confirm some details, or see what train was feasible for their character to take; often it is someone doing some research on their ancestors and trying to find out how they traveled across Canada. Recently I … Read more
The town of White River, Ontario is a small dot on the Trans-Canada Highway north of Lake Superior. It is known as the “birthplace” of Winnie the Pooh, and rail enthusiasts know it as the endpoint of the last public RDC service running in Canada, the Sudbury-White River train.
I’ve uploaded some “new” David Othen videos to his YouTube channel. These are of course not new – since David died in September 2016 – but they were not previously shared on his channel before. Some of the content is in other videos on the site but these clips are “new”. Here’s a short (6m … Read more
I confess that I don’t pay a lot of attention to shipping containers. When two miles of double stacked containers roll by, my eyes glaze over a bit and I don’t look at individual containers. There are just too many and most are fairly generic.
My original train blog was called “Confessions of a Train Geek“. I chose that name because I’d been using the “traingeek” handle for several years prior to starting the blog in 2005. Since then, I’ve used the same “geek” handle for several places. I occasionally post at [Confessions of a] Model Train Geek, I wrote … Read more
The Grand Trunk Western railroad started as the American arm of the Grand Trunk Railway. It became a subsidiary of the Canadian National Railways when the GTR was combined with the former Canadian Northern, the Intercolonial Railway and others by the Canadian government. In 1971 CN formed an American corporation, the Grand Trunk Corporation, to … Read more