Recreating the Past |
FEBRUARY 2002
Once upon a time, fifty and more years ago in a community north of Toronto, a pair of two-lane highways combined into one, then passed over a set of railway tracks and through a small commercial district. Before the construction of Highway 400, all north- and southbound automobile traffic traversed this bottleneck. Where the road crossed the tracks stood an octagonal gateman's shanty and hand-operated crossing gates. Crowded within a small area were a division point railway station and ancillary buildings, a tall red wooden water tower, frame ice house, lawn bowling green, drug store, jewellery store, billiards parlour, grocery stores, hardware stores, post office, restaurants, taxi office and hotel. Watched over by luscious green shade trees, the whole scene was witness to the passage of a dozen or more branchline trains a day over the road crossing and twice as many more on the secondary mainline nearby. The name of the community was Allandale.
Allandale, not Barrie. True, the larger community had absorbed the smaller one before 1900. But to the CNR, its predecessors (who vowed that 'grass would grow in the streets of Barrie while Allandale was paved with gold'), and the families of railwaymen who lived in the south ward (the "Railway Ward") of Barrie, the two places were different. To this day, businesses in Barrie's south end use the name Allandale in their titles, and at least one resident is known to leave his house in the morning and tell his wife "I'm off to Barrie for awhile".
As the new issue of Model Railroad Planning will attest, I am on a mission to recreate a portion of the Allandale Division in HO scale, as it existed in the year 1952, just before Highway 400 was opened in its entirety, and the nature of transportation north of Toronto was changed forever. Central to this project is the construction of the Allandale business district at Essa Road. When I began researching the structures comprising the scene, I happily discovered that a number of the commercial and residential buildings are still standing, albeit somewhat different in appearance than they were fifty years ago.
It occurred to me that here is an opportunity for me (and for other prototype modellers who are depicting their favourite scenes), to experience the past through my own lens. When we look at period photographs, or read books such as Steam at Allandale or Steam Over Palmerston, we are subject to someone else's particular viewpoint and interpretation. But modelling is different, because it gives us the opportunity to create something in three dimensions, to be viewed at any angle. On any given day we can observe such a scene from a new perspective, and make new discoveries. Through enjoying such a glimpse into the past, we are not subject to the all-too-few or all-to-fuzzy or too-early-in-time or too-late-in-time photographs taken from someone else's perspective (indeed, many of the photographs, for which we search so doggedly, only show portions of the features we wish to learn more about).
As I and others are discovering in our attempts to recreate significant scenes of the past, we still must rely on the perspective of others--namely photographs and personal recollections--for the clues in order to put the whole puzzle together. Allow me to describe a portion of my own project. At the Essa Road crossing in Allandale stood Whitty's drug store and Webb's jewellers (both buildings are still extant). I intend to start with these two buildings. Research trips to the local archives have unearthed a number of wonderful pictures of the overall streetscape, taken in the 1900-53 time period. After combining these with photographs of railway operations at Allandale which show the commercial buildings in the background, I had enough material to get me excited about starting construction. Several mysteries remained, however, and it was not until making a personal visit to an individual, who has made a lifetime study of her hometown, that I acquired enough pictures to conclusively identify what everything looked like. The signs alone tell a story! Does anyone know where I can get a good picture of a United Cigar Stores Dealer sign? There are canvas awnings, storefronts with goodies in the windows, poles with hanging signs, barber shop stripes painted on the corner of a building, even a sculpture of an ice cream cone standing on the sidewalk (promoting the soda fountain at the drug store). In short, I have discovered anew that there is no point to freelanced modelling: the real world offers a richer portrayal of life in the postwar years than our imaginations could ever create.
But make no mistake about it, this will be my Allandale. For just like that photographer who stood on a street corner fifty years ago, or that author who is describing operations of a railway division point in the steam era, our own creations, even though they are based on real life, are still an artist's interpretation. That is exactly what makes this hobby of scale modelling so compelling and so exciting--we are artists recreating the world through our own lens. The advantage we possess, however, is that other people may enjoy our work from a number of different viewpoints, and thus make their own discoveries. I will have succeeded for myself and for those other people if we can all study the HO scale recreation of the Essa Road commercial district at length, and truly believe it is a warm summer day between trains, and we would like to pop into that soda fountain for an ice cream cone, find a nice spot under that shade tree, and chat with the crossing attendant while he waits for the return of the Meaford way freight.
Ian Wilson
February 4, 2002
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