Michigan Central Station – 1976

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• More photos of this station at >>> http://www.canadasouthern.com/caso/windsor.htm

• I know this won't happen, but purely from a railfan point of view - how about extending the tracks back to river, having them go under Riverside Dr along the waterfront (giving visitors a great view, then the tracks would go back under Riverside and link up with the other tracks along Caron, and put the station there? Obviously, the park would be impacted. Maybe the park could be built over the tracks? Anyway, if I were building it as my train layout, it would be that way. No need to turn the trains around. But I realize it is more complicated than that.

• First off no one wants a train station in their backyard especially for what is planned for teh city centre west lands.
  Secondly, train tracks on the waterfront? It was a fiasco the first time and took over 100 years to get that riverfront back (Smartly, Stratford decided to tell CP {or CN} to stuff when the railway wanted to do the same along the Avon river). No thanks.

  Now having a train station closer to downtown in the area above plus light rail? Now that would be forward progrees. Seeing that Windsor/Essex is so damned provincial nothing will ever happen.

• What is planned for the City Centre West lands? Wouldn't want to disturb the parking lots...

• it's gonna be pretty difficult to bring a station closer to downtown without putting it in someone's backyard ME. infact, putting a station where this one stood still puts it right back in peoples backyards. but if you move next to the mainline of a class 1 railroad you shouldn't expect it to be pindrop quiet at any time of the day.....ever. i wouldn't worry about tracks on the river anyway...they want a station here for access to the tunnel and Amtrak. but building a new station, in that neighbourhood, just seems like a bad idea. unless it helps to revitalize the area, there's nothing to take you downtown (unless a dedicated shuttle or lightrail is introduced)and i wouldn't really recommend walking thru it or waiting for a bus (closest bus is the dominion). it's not a particularly bad area, but it ain't no rose either. same problem where the station is right now...you get off, your in beautiful old walkerville. now, head down wyandotte to reach downtown, duck & weave your way thru the crack heads and hookers and with any luck, you still have a wallet when you get to the hotel.
  i don't think anyone (CN/CP/ETR)but VIA is on board with this idea anyways so we shouldn't worry about it. there's too many logistical issues between the RR companies to make it work.

• Memory says there were some serious discussions before the station burned about re-opening it to service direct Amtrak service between Detroit and Toronto/Buffalo/New York City. I don't know if closing Walkerville (where many of us boarded CNR steam excursions behing 6167 and 6218 in the 60's) was part of the discussion at that time.

• You know what is planned but it will fall through if no one supports it. Then we will continue to have parking lots for another 20 years.

• From what I read, there was talk to put a new train station by the airport to coincide with the new cargo village (which would have a container rail yard there with freight train access coming from the south part of the old C&O off the CASO), the VIA trains branching off up the old C&0/CN heading south towards the airport to make that location a major entrance point to the city. City Council seems interested in keeping up Big Box Yuppie Land out there so that makes perfect sense from that perspective. And the old C&O/CN line running alongside Walker Rd is going to need some more traffic once GM closes in order to stay open for sure.

• If you look at the demographics of VIA Rail users, its current location isn't that bad, many of the users are students who can take the CrossTown bus route from the university and be there in 10 minutes, where another large group of users are out of town business people who attend meetings downtown, they can leave their meeting at 4:45 on a Friday hop in a cab and still make the 5:10 train. One improvement that would make sense is to build a new station on the south side of the tracks, this would allow for more parking as well give it a more noticeable presence on Wyandotte. Just my 2 cents.

• As a wiz-kid with CNT in 1950, the Great Western station at the foot of Ouellette (Goyeau, exactly) was quite convenient. I stayed with family on Caron Ave. south of Wyandotte. There was a "Creepy R" switching yard just to the west, including a northward line down to their boat dock. There they had a small station perched on the north side of Riverside Dr. West where an operator despatched trains to/from their car ferries to Detroit. Some insisted there was a CP passenger station, but it definitely wasn't that shack at Riverside Dr./CP docks. All I recall was Great Western (CN)(later in Walkerville) and Michigan Central passenger stations. All the railfans and historians around here cannot pinpoint any CP passenger facility other than sharing the Michigan Central. Anyone have a clue?