CNR Pine Street

I’ve been interested in the CNR’s spur on Pine Street in Thorold, Ontario since I was a teenager but finding this A.W. Mooney photo from 1999 online a couple of years ago inspired me to attempt to model the operation. I’m building it as a portable layout, to share the enjoyment of prototype modelling and realistic operation with others.
You can find the original photo with detailed description at the RailPictures.ca site.

When I was a teenager, I became fascinated with the Canadian National Railways lines in Ontario’s Niagara Peninsula. One spur – which ran up the middle of the street I walked to high school – kindled my interest in the Niagara St. Catharines & Toronto Railway.

This is the story of another such ex-NS&T spur – and how I’m modelling it in HO scale as a portable layout.

Twice per week, the CNR would run a few blocks up the middle of Pine Street in Thorold to serve a paper mill in a scene that seemed designed by model railway enthusiasts:

There were just a few spurs and no run-around (because they’re real space eaters on a layout). The spurs were all parallel to save space, but at three different elevations (to add visual variety). Two of the spurs hosted different freight car types with spot-specific sorting (to add to the operating fun). And everything was lined up along the street, making it easy to view and photograph from public property (and easy to fit on a shelf). There’s even a shopping centre across the road, with a nice big sign that tells the viewer exactly where they are.

I always considered this to be an ideal subject for a shelf layout.

I took many pictures of the site over the years. My first photos show freight cars on the spurs but unfortunately for me I never managed to catch a crew actually working the mill. In my later photos, the tracks are gone. But the idea of modelling Pine Street always simmered.

Back in the mid-2000s when my friend Pierre Oliver and I were discussing potential Free-mo projects, we looked at Pine Street – and when I acquired diesels for our endeavor, I numbered them for units that I had photographed working the ex-NS&T lines in St. Catharines. In the end, we built The Peterboro Project instead. Meantime, I saved all of my Pine Street photos and notes in a “someday I’d love to model this” file and got on with other projects.

Then a couple of things happened.

First, I stumbled across some photos of the Pine Street operation online, including the awesome picture by A.W. Mooney at the top of this page. I recently reached out to the photographer and he kindly shared some additional photos with me. (Thank you!) Seeing these pictures reminded me of my desire to model this operation.

Around the same time, I was talking with my friend Robin Talukdar about exhibition layouts and what could be done to present the train show-going public with an alternative approach to the hobby. Shows are dominated by model railways designed as crowd pleasers and they serve an important role. But based on my experience attending North American shows, very few models of railways make the exhibition circuit. I wondered if I could adopt some of the best practices of prototype modelling to a portable layout?

This is my attempt to answer that.

My in-progress HO scale layout, based on CNR Pine Street. Card stock mockups help convey what I’m trying to achieve.

Robin is also a longtime fan of the Pine Street operation and he offered to laser cut some baseboards for me. We determined that I could faithfully model the mill and the first block or so of Pine Street plus a modest staging area on a layout 18 inches deep by 25 feet long. I took delivery of the baseboards in the summer of 2025 and started work on Pine Street in earnest by year-end.

I’m collecting all posts about this layout under the CNR Pine Street in HO category. Enjoy if you visit!