Canadian Bread Bakers & Pastries

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• i do beleive that would be the familiar "Mr. Christie" aka Nibisco/Kraft. that's what wiki is telling me anyways :) looks like "Christie Brown & Co. Ltd" was the canadian subsidary of Nibisco...which i guess stands for National Biscuit Company, didn't know that.

  That's a great looking building, and i always appreciate the effort when a building has a flag pole and it's actually used! it's also nice for me to know the ETR served it. what's weird is that when you look on streetview, the original part of the building only has bricked in windows...so i'm not sure where the train was unloaded. it's also neat to note that just across the MCR tracks, as you pointed out a couple posts ago, is the Post cereal factory. now they're all owned by Kraft...and whoever owns them.
  what happened to our ability to attract companies like that? we had coke bottling stuff, these two making cookies and crackers and whatnot.....
  i don't understand why we don't utilize the ETR anymore either. that road built this city and the city doesn't encourage companies to build along the tracks. that solar panel project could have gone in one of the transmission buildings on walker and supported the ETR. oh well, that's another topic lol
  looking around the hood there is the park building with a twin at erie and mcdougal. and then there's that magnificent church!
  Andrew, got anything on the church?

  great post, thanks Andrew!

• I've always loved the flying buttresses on Holy Name of Mary. Great Church and on the heritage inventory, too bad the rectory was demoed.

  Great little building glad it's being reused. Looks in fantasic shape.

• Great cakes out of the Canadian Bread bakers & Pastires - I bought a cake there back in Ferbruary - was a veritable masterpiece!

• Up to the mid seventies Christies delivered snack cakes and tarts to the grocery stores,you could get two butter tarts for ten cents. They where probably where bakrd and packaged elswhere. This disappeared along with home delivery of milk and bread,progress.

• Aaron - ETR doesn't get the support because there somehow remains a stigma that railroads are archaic and an outdated dinosaur slowly going extinct. Except we need them now more than ever before for numerous reasons - every box car is 4 more semis on the road, roads which get strained and damaged from such excessive truck traffic, clogging up our roadways that we eventually have to pay taxes for to fix them all. Makes no sense at all.

  In the US they "bank" abandoned rail lines - companies are not allowed to rip them up to sell the rail and property off (to get built over, thus all but eliminating future re-use of the rail rightaway path)... in Canada, despite our proud social responsibility heritage, no such laws exists and we have even less regard for rail service in this country. Currently the CASO line is getting up an upgrade as CSX apparently is going to be running rock/gravel trains out of London on it... oddly enough, they used to OWN a line going from Windsor to St Thomas (old Pere Marquette / Hiram Walker line going through Harrow, Kingsville, Leamington, etc) - which they tore up and were allowed to sell off the property. Most of it was made into the Greenway trail, some of it was built over. CSX is apparently looking at investing in - get this - putting rails back in from Pelton to nearly Old Castle (where the Greenway starts) to service the industrial park along that stretch of Walker Road. Had there been a law in place in Canada to make sure the railroad lines were protected and supported, not only would CSX be servicing that industrial park, they would be running their trains out of London down the Greenway line and providing service to farmers and businesses along that route as well. But they aren't, so trucking companies have all these farmers, manufacturers and businesses over a barrel for shipping prices and we sit in traffic behind a bunch of semis as a result. Go figure.

• If people heard the CSX commercial about how many tons can behauled by ONE gallon of gas you would see the value of railroads. If CSX are putting money into Canada they have seen the light.

• Okay they use deseal not gas.

• Carl, i had heard that about the states. gee...what a novel idea! i look at old maps of essex county and it was just criss crossed with steel. places like harrow, kingsville and leamington are finished growing now that the line is gone. the greenhouses and farmers could benifit so much you're right. at the very least every bit of this county, every bit, would be accessable by rail for public transportation right now. CN just recently removed the switch off their mainline at comber that used to run past staples to leamington......so there's another won't ever come back to town sign. if for some reason morton terminal closed, ETR almost couldn't sustain itself. can you beleive there's nothing for them on the east end anymore? as far as i'm concerned rails mean your city is doing well and is prepared to take on any investment......you know, like we used to be? i guess back in the day people didn't cry when the train crossed the street and they had to wait 5 minutes, and recognized the jobs every box car represents.
  and with the oldcastle deal.....figures the city didn't see this coming. they advertise and build up industrial parks, rip out the tracks running to them, than BITCH about the trucks on the streets...stupid.
  Richard, i know..it's incredible what a single enigine can move. people really would see the light and i can't understand why RR's don't advertise that stuff more often.

  ...sorry for the hijack Andrew!

• That's funny, I was just walking by here the other day and wondering what it was way back when.

  As for the train issue, I'm with the rest of the crowd on here. WE NEED RAIL. Here's an idea: rather than build a new bridge, why not repair/upgrade our rail tunnel? At least make it big enough to bring double stacked intermodels through. Trains are more efficient than trucks and make a lot more sense. At least ETR is doing good all things considered. Speaking of which, has anyone been out to check out the new spur on the west end? I think ETR got 2 new customers out that way. Also, last I heard, they are building a new rail ferry out there too. Now, if only they could find more customers on the east end. Other than Border Reload and Ford, I don't think they have any customers east of their office.

  Heyyyy Andrew, there's an idea for a future post, the ETR. From experience I can tell you they are very welcoming to photographers. I went to get some pictures of the cabooses and ended up getting free run of the yard.

• Real sad part about the old Comber to Leamington CASO line is that both Heinz and the farmers wanted the rails to remain - even though CN's service was limited (on purpose) and not that great, it was still a sweetheart deal compared to what the trucking companies were going to (and did and continue to) charge after the rails were pulled. CN wanted to kill that line because they had no interest in servicing a spur as part of their new mainline only mentality after going (US controlled) private. Heinz desperately wanted to keep them there but CN refused to repair or replace any of the plug door box cars they provided that Heinz used to ship their food products. Since the type of boxcar was unavailable anywhere else, whatever boxcars CN had left in working order was all they would offer Heinz. As a result, once the numbers of those cars dwindled, so did the financial reports, which enabled CN to prove to the federal government that the rail line was no longer profitable and they could rip it up and sell the rail and the land (which is similar to what CSX did with the old Hiram Walker line). The sad reasoning though was that CN would rather pull the rails than have sold it to ETR - better to have no rail service at all than help the local competition (logic being - they would get the businesses to ship by truck and eventually any quantities being shipped long distance would get loaded on a train at some point anyways, thus the mainline mentality in action).
  The kicker being Canadian National used to be a crown operation for the sole purpose of providing service to communities which otherwise would be too remote to be populated and thus not profitable for any business or private shipping companies to service. ETR allegedly also had interest in the old Hiram Walker CSX line but never was given the chance to even seriously consider purchasing it. There has also been talk that ETR has similarly been blocked at looking into purchasing the Essex CASO line, even though CN uses it only as a giant spur siding to service Windsor and the tunnel these days. CSX did the same thing for the same reasons. This was allowed to happen... the only thing stopping them was a ridiculously loopholed federal law stating that a rail company had to prove a line was unprofitable for 7 years before closing it and selling it off.

  I remember being 18 sitting in Dale's Music Room in Leamington when the mayor came in and I got the nerve up to ask him on his way out the door if anything was being done to save the rail line or purchase it to sell it to another company (ETR) or at least prevent it from never being available again. He looked at me like I was stupid and laughed and said the line isn't profitable anymore and railroads are dead. And this is what passed (and passes) for wisdom and long term thinking in government.
  As stated, somehow even the US government has had the better social responsible thinking on this issue, even though it's probably more related to US heritage than anything (Canada is embarrassed by it's heritage, especially anything of the modern era 1900 - 1980... case in point the numerous scars displayed on this website's Windsor case study).

  Funny that in the subsequent decade immediately following the removal of the CSX Hiram Walker county line, traffic in the county got so bad due to increased truck traffic that the old #3 has now been converted into a 4 lane highway, costing the taxpayers here hundreds of millions of dollars to do. And how many people also died out there because of that traffic congestion over the years? It's sickening to see the ramifications... and politicians, especially around here with the insular thinking, have next to no ideas about trains other than "they're an old novelty left over from the mid 20th Century", nevermind having any progressive thoughts surrounding them at all.

  And this is only freight talk, not even getting into some commuter rail stuff.