AUGUST 1999

    Visitors to this web site may be interested to know that the model railway layout featured on these pages is no more.  This past week, I had the not-so-enviable task of dismantling a model railway.  Four years of painstaking work on hand-laid track, structures, scenery and details came to an end when the Grand River & Northern ended as a pile of rubble on the floor (thankfully, numerous photographs from all angles were taken, and these will appear in feature magazine articles over the next little while).

    Of course, the ending of one layout signals the beginning of another.  Turning my attention to the Allandale Division and its modelling possibilities, I very quickly zeroed in on the Newmarket Subdivision south of Allandale as a basis for a future model railway.  Readers of Steam At Allandale will be familiar with the vegetable growing and shipping operations associated with the Holland Marsh near Bradford.  Ever since seeing strings of 40' steel refrigerator cars in the Allandale yards as a boy, I have been intrigued by the phenomenal Holland Marsh market garden and the interesting railway traffic it provides.

    A vast plain of peat bog, drained and cultivated beginning in the 1930s, was the basis for the present day Holland Marsh.  In the years following the Second World War, consumer demand for fresh produce fuelled the metamorphosis of this swamp into Canada's market garden and a major shipping point for Canadian National Railways.

    In 1946, the Bradford Co-operative Cold Storage facility was constructed, along with the Holland River Gardens vegetable pre-packaging plant.  This installations were followed by the Federal Farms vacuum cooling plant in 1948 and a succession of other packing plants.  Business for the CNR (and the competing highway) increased steadily from 1946 through the early 1960s.

    Chief crops for the Holland Marsh in the 1946-58 period of interest were celery, onions, carrots, potatoes and lettuce.  Other market produce such as parsnips, cauliflower, beets and radishes were grown in lesser quantities.   During the peak shipping season from late August until early winter, between 1000 and 2000 refrigerator carloads of produce were shipped out of Bradford each year, with as many as 15 reefers a day loaded.

    All of the reefers used at Bradford were of the end-bunker type, and most (if not all) of them carried US road markings such as Pacific Fruit Express (PFE), Santa Fe Refrigerator Department (SFRD), American Refrigerator Transit (ART), Merchant's Dispatch Transit (MDT) and Fruit Growers' Express (FGE).  A string of available reefers was kept in readiness on the team track (numbering about 15 at any point in time), and when the call came from the shipper, the CNR agent arranged for a section man to install and light charcoal heaters in the end bunkers.  Either the north- or south-bound way freight (or both) spotted cars at shipper platforms, as directed by a switch list provided to the train crew by the agent.  The loaded cars were then retrieved from a siding by southbound manifest freight number 410 sometime in the evening.

    As with merchandise and livestock, perishables on a manifest train received preferential treatment.  While the waybills travelled in the same train as the shipment, information concerning car numbers, routings, lading and handling instructions were wired from the Bradford agent to the Superintendent at Toronto ahead of time.  The "reefer blocks" were marshalled at the front of the train, in order that yard crews in Toronto could remove them quickly and re-marshal them into connecting manifests.

    The competition for the lucrative produce traffic of the Marsh led the CNR to establish a nightly vegetable train out of Allandale in the 1950s to contend with the improved road facilities provided by Highway 400.  Reefer movements out of Bradford in the late 1940s and 1950s were fascinating, and unique in Canada.   In many ways, the operations represented those of California, the only real competitor to the Marsh, and upon which the cold storage and pre-packing facilities were based.  It is a scenario worthy of modelling, and one which I will share with readers of these web pages and other published media over the months and years to come.

Ian Wilson
August 1, 1999

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