NST: Geneva Street Terminal

Posted byTrevorPosted inLayout Design, Layout Tour, Layouts I have designed or built, Niagara St Catharines & Toronto Railway in 1:64, Philosophy

In a previous post on building more benchwork for my S scale version of the Niagara St. Catharines & Toronto Railway, I mentioned that I was forced to juggle the relationship between signature scenes in order to make the real railway fit into my space. I thought I’d share some of my design decisions through a series of posts.

In the first post, I described how I’ll model certain signature scenes off the Port Dalhousie Subdivision – including Woodruff Siding, Ontario Street, and the NS&T car barn. Now, let’s look at how I’m going to model the NS&T’s terminal at Geneva Street in St. Catharines.

Photo shot from the southwest corner of Geneva Street and Welland Avenue, looking northeast. The track through the trees is a scene I plan to capture on my layout.
A colourized postcard of the terminal.

This is a terrific view of the main terminal building for the Niagara St. Catharines & Toronto Railway. It shows off the design of the building quite well.

Built by the CNR in 1923 and opened in 1924, the building faced Geneva Street on the west side of a triangular shaped lot. The NS&T’s head offices were located on the upper floor, while a ticket office and waiting room occupied the street level. The terminal area included three stub tracks that entered the lot from the east (right) and three through tracks that ran past the north side of the building, parallel to Balfour Street.

An aerial photo of the terminal illustrating the triangular shaped lot and multiple routes that passed by it.

The terminal was designed to accommodate trains on the several subdivisions, as well as Main Line trains to and from Niagara Falls. City cars would provide connections to the downtown, just to the west.

However, this transportation hub was never used as intended. Few runs originated or terminated here and Welland Division trains never used it. In later years, photos show the platform tracks sometimes occupied by maintenance of way equipment.

Express motor 41 spotted on one of the three stub tracks on the east side of the terminal.

When I lived in St. Catharines, the terminal housed a Bank of Montreal branch and a business (secretarial) school. It was demolished in (I believe) the 1990s to make way for a strip mall.

Yet, despite never having seen the terminal when it was in use, I have some superb photos of it in my collection and several others have been published in books about the railway. So it’s definitely a signature scene.

From a layout operations perspective, I like that this is a meeting place for several lines.

My layout space has an awkward, triangle-shaped corner – perfect for the terminal. This is located to the left of the Ontario Street scene and behind the Woodruff Siding scene described in a previous post. I placed the Geneva Street scene about an inch higher than Woodruff Siding: It’s a small variation, but enough to visually separate them.

I didn’t have room for all six tracks – the benchwork becomes pretty deep pretty quickly in 1:64 – but I was able to incorporate several key features. These include the three stub tracks, the siding in the trees along the north side of Welland Avenue, and the Grantham Sub to Port Dalhousie East.

My version of the terminal is drawn in red. The three stub tracks run between canopied platforms. The turnouts at right are in the pavement of Welland Avenue.
The train against the wall is on a narrow staging shelf that represents the Grantham Subdivision. The open space between the terminal and this staging track provides access to this deeper scene. I’ll disguise it with trees.
This view of Ontario Street – covered in a previous post, shows two trains on staging tracks against the wall. These will be hidden in the McKinnon’s building. The near track will hold a transfer run from the NS&T-CNR interchange yard at Merritton. The back track represents the Lakeshore Subdivision to Port Weller. Both feed into the Geneva Street scene around the corner to the left.
Another look at Woodruff Siding from a previous post. The Geneva Street scene is to the left, about an inch higher, and curves around the walls to the right to end up in two staging tracks hidden by the McKinnon building on Ontario Street.

I’ll continue the tour in a future post.

Published by Trevor

Lifelong model railway enthusiast and retired amateur shepherd who trained a border collie to work sheep. Professional writer and editor, with some podcasting and Internet TV presenting work thrown in for good measure.