Arrival Of Railways In Toronto: Impact On The City's Economic Fortunes

The Arrival of Railways in Toronto Name Course Name/Section Instructor’s Name Date Introduction On sixteenth May 1853, Toronto’s first passenger train steamed out from a wooden depot situated near the location of the eastern passageway of now’s Union Station. As the century progressed, the railways profoundly impacted the city’s economic fortunes. What was once the disregarded small town of York transformed into a regional manufacturing center since goods could be conveyed by rail from Toronto to Ontario. Compared to Montreal, Toronto was a commercial backwater at the start of the railway epoch. However, by the 1890s and the conclusion of the railway epoch, Montreal was outstripped by Toronto as Canada’s economic engine. Like all extensive technological advancements, the railways were both advantageous and disadvantageous for Toronto’s people. The tracks damaged and deformed the city and successfully cut off Toronto’s citizens from Lake Ontario; the metropolis’s most paramount scenic and recreational asset. The town’s best real estate was hogged by the railway companies, consuming enormous tracts of major waterfront land for roadbed, buildings, stations, yards, servicing facilities, and tracks; this further distanced the lakeshore from Torontonians. This railway heritage contributes to Toronto’s most important debates: the resurgence of the waterfronts. Some stakeholders participating in this dispute understand the connection between the waterfront’s shape and Toronto’s railway legacy. Toronto’s railway history is a dynamic and fascinating story, abounding in colorful personalities, local rivalry, massive constructing and engineering projects, chimerical political leadership tempered by local rivalry, corporate corruption and the most superb railway terminal ever constructed in Canada. Discussion The Toronto Locomotive Works (TLW), in 1853, built and manufactured Canada’s first locomotive. Erewhile, locomotives were being imported from the United States or Great Britain. James Good, an immigrant from Ireland, who in 1840 founded a mill in Toronto that manufactured plows, stoves, kettles, stationary steam engines, and boilers, owned the TLW. By 1852, James Good’s TLW employed over one hundred artisans and was based in a vast complex of Yonge and Queen Street’s northeast corner, roughly where the Elgin-Winter Garden Theatre and St. Michael’s Hospital are located today. On sixteenth April 1853, the new locomotive was finished. The engine was twenty-nine tons in weight and twenty-six feet in length without the tender. Considered small by later railway yardsticks, at that time, the engine was deemed as one of the enormous proportions. The Ontario, Simcoe, and Huron (OS&H) called the locomotive Toronto, and it was exhibited for two days on Queen Street to admiring citizens. William Mackenzie, former political firebrand, and Toronto mayor, wrote lovingly about the engine, he called it, “Truthfully a stunning piece of machinery very sturdy and handsomely finished.”[Boles, Derek. “Ontario, Simcoe & Huron Railway – Groundbreaking & The “Toronto.”Toronto RailwayHistorical Association. December 2011. Accessed March 19, 2018./resources/111015.Toronto.1st.Railway.by.Derek.Boles.pdf.] [�...