Michigan Central Station – 1976

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• i still can't beleive that for a city with sooooooo much railway heritage, there is virtually nothing to say so. can you imagine the steam engines arriving, watching as the Maple Leafs get off to enjoy a once thriving city before a game in Detroit?!!that used to be such a busy spot. such a good loking building.the station seems like it should be in santa fe or some other dusty, desert like locale. you can still see the platform for the shelter across the old mainline (used to be two tracks there). i think that concrete rectangle with earth in it would have been the staircase to the pedestrian tunnel from the shelter (which was also a very nice structure). pull the map over towards Wellington and you see the concrete walkway which led to the tunnel, and another patch running north west from the walkway would have been the platform area for the freight house. if you follow the dirt road from there,it follows an old railbed that crossed over collage, crossed the ETR tracks,then dipped down into the rail cut, under university, wyndotte, and riverside to the car ferries.
  how is it we as a community had 4......4! beautiful train stations welcoming people to the city....and not a single one of them remain?? to be replaced with a single, ugly box. i understand passenger service isn't even a whisper of what it was, but gimme a break. there are hundreds of stations around north america with no tracks anywhere near them for miles because they've been pulled up...yet they still stand, and those communities get to enjoy them, learn about, and understand they're past.

  oh.....and nice replacements for the building's lighting! street lights???

  thanks for the post Andrew!

• intrestingly, if not in the "never gonna happen" file....i found this article in the city website talking about VIA Rail wanting to move their station closer to downtown and want to run on CP's tracks. here's the location they'd like:

  • VIA would prefer a new Windsor station closer to downtown.
  • A potential site for a new station is the area north of the Van de
  Water Yard, bounded by the Windsor Subdivision, the ETR
  mainline, and Tecumseh Road.

  isn't that exactly where this one stood??? stupid arsonist. the damn thing could have been used once again. i'm not sure this is closer than Walkerville though. i think they should bring the trains right downtown and stop infront of the casino almost like they used to. a couple tracks with really nice wrought iron fencing around it would work great on the water. just keep it close to the hill along the drive so it don't split the park up too much.

• There is a whole lot of photo history regarding the Michigan Central RR in this area at this site.
  http://www.canadasouthern.com/

• when was this one built?

• I remember that place very well. I lived a couple blocks away. There was a maintenance tunnel of some sort that had an enterance off of Wellington. I woner if there is any sign of that today.

• Was this the station the CP used or was there another not too far from it? I hadn't thought the one I'm remembering was this far south. I took the CP to and from London when I was in high school and returned from Welland that way once some years later. I thought the one that burned was the station I'd been to and that one looks like it but then, they all looked pretty much alike at one time.

• Ric - This one was built in 1911.

  Here's another photo of it, from a post in 2006:

  http://internationalmetropolis.com/?p=87

• I used to hang out there all the time as a kid with my father as he was a train fan and we knew the switch board operator, Ken Annett. The switch board to run the tunnel train traffic was installed in the main room (seen in the photo - underneath the "Windsor" sign). The station was in **immaculate** condition. I was just a kid at the time but I do recall being impressed by the interior and how well everything was maintained despite the station's only use being to house the tunnel switch board... which of course was then replaced digitally sometime in the mid to late 90's, leaving the station completely vacant... and sadly, ripe for vandals to destroy, which is what happened. I have a lot of memories there as I literally had the run of the place - I was I had brought a camera with me in retrospect. My dad still has some photos of the station, inside and out, from the 80's though, perhaps I'll have to get him to dig them up for this site.

• I remember in the 60's, C.P. Passenger service used this station. My uncle came in on the train near christmas and we went to meet him. I was maybe 7yrs old. He got of the train, the station was crowded, and he starts yelling "I shot him, I shot Santa Clause". While my parents could explain that Uncle Doug was just joking, I always wondered how other parents explained it. A beautiful building, now just a vacant spot.

• Btw - if anyone is interested in seeing this station on video, a local videographer / train documentarian has several videos available documenting local rail history of the past 20 years (and more), available here: http://www.ericsrailfanvideo.com