March 30/17 Classic Photo of the Day shows Niagara Falls station In 1953. We still have the station used for, believe it or not, Trains!
Photo of the Day also mentions the train coming from Hamilton, which had a beautiful CNR station. Often overlooked due to TH&B/CPR/NYC art deco station in the center of the city. This is the CNR station.
Has a bit of resemblance to Buckingham Palace, don’t you think?
Fantastic building!
Yes, you are correct Firelock76, never occurred to me!
My grandmother worked like a horse doing everything in her Fish and Chip restaurant in Hamilton, mostly orders for home delivery, which a bunch of kids, including me of course, on their bicycles with the orders wrapped in newspapers in a front mounted carrier basket fanned out all over the city. Can you imagine that today? No way! Oh the horror!
Point is- She absolutely loved to go to Port Dover on Lake Erie for ten days every year at the height of summer for a vacation and for several years she took me along. We would take the train to Port Dover which originated from that station in Hamilton. Daily except Sunday…it terminated in Port Rowan, further down the lake. Armstrong turntable.
The memories of the station are forever in my memory. The restaurants, the coffee shop, the news vendors, the intercom. The lighting, the long corridor to the gates and the long stairs down to the tracks. This was big time stuff. The importance of it all. The warmth.
An incredible feeling for a kid.
That train and it’s smallish and ancient moguls and ten wheelers ran until 1958. It was never dieselized. I saw a picture once of the train ready for departure, taken from the platforms, surrounded by Northerns and Mountains on the left and right. Our trains engines were just teapots next to them.
I would not trade those memories for a million bucks. Thankfully the main building is preserved but it is no longer a railway station.
The complex consists of three masses, each distinct in form and materials. Its most distinguishing structure is the impressive limestone clad, Beaux-Arts main station building, dominated by a central entrance po
Miningman, I guess your grandmother remembered the old station.
https://archive.org/stream/viewbookofhamilt00hami#page/n1/mode/2up
Thanks for this Wanswheel. My grandmother did not come to Hamilton until 1948 so I don’t think she had any remeberances of the old GTRwy station.
Folks in Hamilton always talked about the incline railways going up the mountain. There were 2 of them. Every so once in a while there is talk of rebuilding but it never comes about. The newer one up from James Street was steam powered. Neither of them survive, with only concrete remnants remaining here and there.
Probably could’ve kept it going with a few more passengers. Dizzying.
Dizzying is the right word Wanswheel.
Wonder if you could even run something like this today? Regulations, Safety concerns and all that.
Great Photos…have never seen these views before.
Miningman, I’ll bet your grandmother’s “Fish N’ Chips” were just as unforgettable as my grandmother’s ravioli!
Grandmas are good for that!
I’ve only had two really, really good fish and chips platters in my life and had to go out of the country for 'em. The first in Portsmouth England after visiting HMS Victory in 1976, and Placentia Newfoundland in 1997. Worth the trips, both times!
The Fish N Chips sure were good Firelock76. Had to be Halibut, always, only ran into something similiar with the batter once, and that was in WaWa, Ontario of all places, home of the Giant Goose! So I concur, only had 2 outstanding. My Friday nights were a gourmet feast! Gosh we peddled our butts off on those bicycles, especially Fridays. Thurs and Sat were also busy but not like Friday.
I remember well the sweat and pure exhaustion on my grandma when she finally got to sit around 10:00 or 10:30. It was stunning and admirable to behold. 4 Huge vat fryers going non stop. Worked peddling like a maniac right up until the end of my 2nd year in High School. We did pretty good on tips! Could buy cool shirts, albums and the latest in N Scale. Atlas cars were $1.49!
I sold a mint set of 7 JCTimmer cars with those crappy paint jobs for $700 at an auction. Bought them new at $1.29-$1.99. The rest of them I kept. They’ve been runners since 1966? 67? …anyway long time.
Wow! Sounds like Friday night in Hamilton was fish n’ chips night, just like Friday night in New Jersey is pizza night. Or any other night for that matter. Pizza night used to be Saturday night until the Church dropped the “fish on Friday” rule.
We have a saying in New Jersey, “Seven days without pizza makes one weak!”
When I was in high school my part-time job pay went for First World War fighter plane model kits, as a matter of fact I converted my O gauge layout into a German airfield circa 1917. I didn’t try to explain what American trains were doing circling the Red Baron’s hangout.
I don’t know what’s happening in Canada but it breaks my heart slightly to see the First World War Centennial coming and going here in the US with hardly a burp. A book on American WW1 veterans I purchased in the 70’s probably summed it up pretty well. The author said “World War Two, Korea, Viet Nam, and the Space Race pushed the Doughboys into the background a lot faster than anyone suspected.” Sad, but it’s really a forgotten war here.
I think it may be more a matter of perspective. In the US you have that beautiful mounument to the Viet Nam War where you list all 56,000 lost soldiers. I just checked and the population then was about 200 million. In Canada during WWI we lost 50,000 soldiers, but our population at the time was only 8 million. Which means for anyone who had family here before WWI, like myself, it affects many things, like our family make up and where we live today. It may be subtle, and sometimes not fully understood, but effects of that war still make up part of who we are today.
Bruce
Firelock76- There were numerous remeberances across the land in 2014 and continue as we remember major battles, such as Vimy Ridge, as the 100 years approaches again for each battle.
Canada, as you well know, but maybe not others, entered the war right at the outset in 1914 alongside Britian so were in it 3 years longer than the USA.
Every “podunk” town across the land has a WWI Monument, far more than WWII Monuments. It lists the dead from the town, usually a Cairn or mounted canon.
WWI history is fascinating unto itself. Mankind found industrial slaughter in place of all the high hopes for a limitless future that the Victorians assumed would be. I think your own Civil War was a slight preview of that.
The anniversaries have been a pretty big deal up here.
Harper commemorates 100th anniversary of First World War
Thank God you folks remember! Thank God someone remembers!
When I was a kid growing up in northern New Jersey in the 60’s it seemed like every town had a World War One memorial with an appropriate Doughboy statue on it. I guess my fascination with World War One began with those statues, those odd uniforms didn’t look anything at all like the ones the guys wore in all those World War Two movies I used to watch. “Who were those men?” I asked myself. “The World War? When was that?” It was called The World War here in the US. The number “One” came later. Anyway, I made it my business to find out, and what a study it was. Sadly those statues are curiousities now. I wonder if today anyone young looks at them and wonders as I did.
But on the other end of the spectrum, World War Two is still hot-hot-hot, as far as movies, TV shows and documentarys, and even video games are concerned. Probably lots of reasons why, and no one reason. You can start with the “cast of characters” and just go from there.
The irony is, there would have been no World War Two without World War One.
And there may not have been a WW II if Treaty of Versailles had been conciliatory among the parties instead of vindictive.
Amen brother! Remember the old saying, “Don’t kick a man when he’s down?” The South was kicked hard when it was down after the Civil War and we wound up with the Ku Klux Klan. The Germans were kicked even harder after World War One and we wound up with Hitler and the Nazi Party.
President Wilson should have known better. He grew up in the Reconstruction South and remembered what it was like, as a boy he even saw Sherman’s army come through. As a lawyer and historian he might have guessed what was going to happen but sadly, he didn’t.
Thank God the lesson was learned after World War Two. Compare the Treaty of Versailles with the Marshall Plan. What a difference.
Wilson had many failings, but it is a bit unfair to suggest that he was in favor of the punitive peace terms after WWI, or the failure of the League of Nations. He understood the possible consequences, and he was right.
Tom
The South had John Wilkes Booth to thank for the vindictive treatment that they received after the Civil War. Lincoln wanted the country to heal it’s wounds, with him killed by Southern sympathizers the healing mood and leadership was eliminated from the reconstruction period.
Booth certainly deserves a lot of the blame, but the fact was there were a lot of “bitter-enders” up North that wanted to see the South punished, and punished hard. They’d have gone after the South even if Lincoln hadn’t been killed.
Without Lincoln around to keep them in check the Radical Republicans pretty much had their way. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson tried to persue Lincoln’s policy but without Lincoln’s finess and political genius he just couldn’t pull it off. A complicated story, too involved to go into here.