York – Durham Heritage Railway

York – Durham passenger car at Uxbridge station

Route length:

20 km

		Uxbridge
		Goodwood († 1960)
		Durham region / York region
		Lincolnville
		Stouffville
		GO transit route to Toronto

The York – Durham Heritage Railway (YDHR) is a standard gauge museum railway north of Toronto in the York and Durham regions of Ontario .

business

The York-Durham Heritage Railway operates non-stop on the Metrolinx route between Uxbridge Station and the Stouffville GO Transit station . On the route from Lincolnville to Stouffville, it shares the tracks with the GO transit suburban trains. The round trip takes about 2½ hours. The operation is carried out exclusively by volunteer members of the York-Durham Heritage Railway Association.

Scheduled trains run on weekends from June to mid-October. They are pulled by the Alco RS-11 diesel locomotive # 3612, which was built in 1956 for the Duluth, Winnipeg & Pacific Railway . There are historic passenger cars from the 1910s and 1920s as well as lightweight cars from 1954.

The railcars are parked in the open air in the depot on the corner of Railway Street and King Street West in Uxbridge. There are several engine sheds and sheds on the site. The most historically valuable building is the Uxbridge station building, built in 1904.

history

A day with Thomas, the little locomotive , 2015

The so-called Uxbridge Subdivision was built in 1871 by the Toronto and Nipissing Railway as a narrow-gauge railway with a gauge of 3 feet 6 inches (1067 mm). The miserable financial returns in the late 1870s disgruntled shareholders who believed that the narrow-gauge railroad was not effective enough for freight transport, even though the railroad had better numbers than its neighbors. The line was therefore switched to standard gauge in 1882 shortly after it was acquired by the Midland Railway . After several company mergers, it became part of the Canadian National Railway (CN) in 1923 .

In the 1980s, CN closed the line. The tracks north of Uxbridge were dismantled, but the line south of it was acquired by GO-Transit (now Metrolinx ) in order to maintain it for possible commuter traffic from Uxbridge to Toronto. Until this is introduced, the York – Durham Railway is the sole operator of the route north of Lincolnville station.