23 March 2006
Piece of Railway History Burns to the Ground
Orangeville - A piece of Orangeville's railway history burned to the ground on Tuesday, with
nothing but the chimney left standing at the former CPR restaurant and bunkhouse.
The Orangeville Fire Department received the call just after 3 p.m. and arrived to find a barely smoking building on the outside,
although the fire was by then on the first and second floors inside.
They had help from an Alton fire crew in the initial stages and the Shelburne fire department responded to two other calls in town for
Orangeville.
Cause of the fire is believed to be a pod light on the first floor that had completely burned through and flames from it are believed
to have travelled up through the building and into the attic, where the crews couldn't get to it.
Fire Chief Macintosh said that once the fire had spread to the attic and set the building blazing, there was nothing they could do at
that point to save it and decided instead to protect the exposures.
"There comes a point in a fire where there's nothing more you can do," he said.
"We had a crew in there for probably about 45 minutes trying to fight it and then it started to get too dangerous. So we pulled
them out and went to a defensive attack."
Before the building was completely on fire some of the crew managed to save two tour train billboards that were hung on the outside.
The damage is estimated at $200,000, although as the chief said, you can't replace a heritage building.
The department was called to a fire at the building last year, but it was only minor.
Although the building had two smoke detectors, neither was of a type that could be linked to the fire department.
Town Communications Officer Sheila Duncan confirmed that the detectors had been checked within recent weeks.
The fire crew was there until about 11 p.m. Tuesday night making sure the fire was entirely out.
The building was the last of many structures once found in the railway yards, which included a station (now the Train Station
Restaurant on Armstrong Street), a roundhouse and several freight storage buildings.
The restaurant/bunkhouse was built in the 1940s at or near the site of predecessors, one of which stood there at least 100 years ago.
The restaurant, on the first floor, was used by passengers on the four daily passenger trains, all of which stopped in Orangeville long
enough for the passengers to get drinks and sandwiches. It featured two horseshoe-shaped lunch bars with a kitchen in the
rear.
With the end of branch-line passenger service, the restaurant closed in 1959, and after that the building was used
exclusively as a bunkhouse. The railyard was established in 1871 and there is a record of an original structure on the site, used
primarily as a restaurant, in 1901.
The bunkhouse upstairs was for CPR freight crews who would be stationed overnight while working on branch lines radiating out of
Orangeville to Teeswater, Elora and Walkerton, as well as on the main line between Toronto and Owen Sound.
Owned by the Town of Orangeville since 2000, when the remaining line between Streetsville and Orangeville was purchased by the Town, the
building had sat empty, its first-floor windows boarded up, save for a small office used by the short line operator, Cando
Contracting Ltd.
At the height of the fire, the nearby three-coach Credit Valley Explorer tour train was moved away from the fire
scene.
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