Rerouting the Gardiner over the Railway!
#1
Hi Gang,

For those of you that are not familiar, I'm talking about Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

There is a crumbling elevated expressway that runs across the south side of the city, between the downtown area and the shore of Lake Ontario.

History:

The south side of Toronto ended at Front Street and the piers and docks along Lake Ontario.

When the Railways were built ~150 years ago, they were constructed on landfill over "Water Lots" that pushed the shoreline south into the Toronto Harbour.

All of the new land south of Front Street was industrial and was mostly cut off from the rest of the city by the railway corridor.

Eventually, during the 1960's an elevated cross town Expressway was built just south of the railway corridor. The expressway named for city planner/politician Frederick G. Gardiner.

In the late 1960's and through the 1970's the railways moved their main yards out of the area and the industries moved too, leaving behind an industrial wasteland.

Although the rail yards and service areas are gone, along with the industries, there is still a major railway corridor that carries regional GO Transit Trains and National VIA Rail through Toronto Union Station.

The area south of the rail corridor and expressway is being rebuilt with a lot of condos and some parkland along the water. The area is known now as Harbourfront and the East Dock Lands.

I hope that the above information paints a picture for people who are not familiar with Toronto.

The Gardiner Expressway is crumbling and costs the city a lot of money to maintain. There is now discussion on the future of the "Mistake by the Lake". Some people want to tear it down, while others want to maintain or enlarge it.

One plan is to replace it with a cable stayed viaduct built on top of the Railway Corridor.

There was an article last week [Friday] in the National Post [I think] that I read online will surfing around.

I didn't bookmark the article, but it contained a couple of links that I did Bookmark:

The first one advocates a cable-stayed viaduct above the Railway Corridor:
http://www.toviaduct.com/Home.html

This one is the public consultation...
http://www.gardinerconsultation.ca/
Ron Wm. Hurlbut
Toronto, Ontario, Dominion of Canada
Ontario Narrow Gauge Show
Humber Valley & Simcoe Railway Blog
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