Grab an older map of Essex County, and in the area of Walker and Provincial, you will see a dot on the map named “Pelton”. There never was actually a community around the spot on the map, but there was a rail line junction with a control tower, more of a rail junction, there is still a bit of history behind it.
When Bernie was going through his slides, looking for riverfront photos for us, he found a bunch from Pelton that he pulled and had John scan as well.
A Google Earth view of the location of the Pelton Spur.
Photo © Bernie Drouillard
A crop shot of the Pelton tower. This photo was taken January 22, 1989, and at this point you can see the tower is boarded up and no longer in use. The Pelton tower along the Canada Southern Rail Line bit the dust November 29, 1991.
Photo © Bernie Drouillard
Photo Taken June 22, 1980
Photo © Bernie Drouillard
Photo Taken August 21, 1988
Photo © Bernie Drouillard
Photo Taken January 22, 1989
Photo © Bernie Drouillard
Photo Taken May 21, 1989
Photo © Bernie Drouillard
Photo Taken February 25, 1991
Here is a great photo of the Pelton tower. A big thank you to Geoff Elliott for the permission to repost his photos here.
A case of being in the right place, at the right time, Geoff was down at the Pelton spur in November, 1991, the day the tower came down.
Looks to me like the building eater, made very quick work of this old relic.
A few years ago, I paid a visit to Pelton to see if there was anything there. I noticed the Pelton name on the CN machinery boxes in the area.
I’m sure the area used to be much busier than it is today. Today, outlines can be seen where the rails used to run.
I believe that this is near where the tower stood.
A slab of rail laying around on site, reveals that it was forged by Algoma in the 1940’s (the last number is cut off)
A look up at one of the old telephone poles, also speaks volumes about how busy the corridor used to be. Look at all the insulators, each one would have carried a separate, power, phone or telegraph line..
An abandoned hut along the tracks, south of the 401 overpass.
I’m not sure what the site looks like now, since these photos were taken, they did some work on the gas lines in the area after these photos were taken, plus the 401 widening have been staging in there.
I willing to bet the remaining traces of the area, are probably now wiped out.
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lol, I love stories like that. I'm sure your dad never forgot the name "Pelton" lol
I see the spur line. It's on the top left corner of the substation. turning to the left into the main tracks. My guess is from the looks of it is they built it for delievery of the substation equpiment. You have to zoom in one or two levels from full zoom to really notice it though.
Ah yes, I see it. That's subtle!
I wonder if anybody has done a walk along the length of Little River and documented it. Same with Turkey Creek.
Well now I've been following rail lines in Windsor via google. There are a remarkable amount of industry served by spur lines still.
So many of these lines in Toronto have been abandoned, as much of the industry here evaporated in the early 90s with Free Trade (one reason why Toronto is not suffering the way Windsor is -- the bottom dropped 16 years ago here).
I'm really enjoying the rail pictures. Railways in this city were such an imporant and integral part of the growth and industrialization of our city.
Which brings me to another point (which may be a debate for another board). I've had this discussion with John a few times. City council on one hand claims they want to reduce the amount of trucks on city streets, but in the same breath they are trying to push a plan to shut down all local rail lines (with the exception of the CP line) and amalgamate all traffic onto this line. Does city council think the freight magically just jumps onto the trains?!? Of course id doesn't. It gets onto the trains via industrial sidings and spurs that run off of the rail lines that City Council wants to shut down. This would in turn force all our remaining industries to ship by truck. But wait a minute, I thought we were trying to reduce truck traffic on city streets?
The ironic thing, is the one line that the City wants to keep (and upgrade) is the CP Line which primarily carrys international traffic (mainly trains from Toronto to Chicago). It's basically the Huron Church of Windsor area rail lines.
Sorry for getting on a rant there, guys.
Don't be fooled by Google maps. Google shows rail lines that no longer exist. According to Google, rails (formerly PM) continue from the riverfront along Walker Road all the way to Paquette Corners. There are other anomalies as well. Some of these maps must be quite old and out of date; who knows how old the satellite views are as well.
I was following satellite only, not the map. Satellite i figure is a little -- newer. You can usualy tell by some kind of recent development (though there are so many images, you can only speculate).
shawn, i follow the rail lines on google all over the place. i love finding a spot along any given line that switches off and then turns all abandoned. sometimes they run into a crop of trees where at one time there was a rail siding, or a town. or, if you want to see some neat stuff, follow the tracks around in detroit. there are sooooo many abandoned lines in that city!
takes you thru some pretty wacky areas. takes you to all kinds of abandoned, burnt out factories, vacated neighbourhoods etc..etc. i like when the rails have been pulled up but they used to run between building, so the scar will never go away because the buildings are shaped like the path of the line.
i followed tracks from detroit to new york city before! yeah....i was on a 12hr shift.
also, google earth IS horribly wrong. according to it, the Aquarama is still moored in buffalo, the ste.claire is still moored near belle isle...and so on, and so on.
Just a quick thought on the abandoned/unused powerline pole...since telegraph was mentioned, I assume this was one of the major uses of them, considering it was the railways that were in the telegraph business? Just thinking off the top of my head it would make sense for them to use their own right-of-ways for the telegraph lines.