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The Toronto Railway Heritage Centre will occupy part of the refurbished historic Toronto Union Station. Most of this space will be located surrounding the Great Hall on the upper floors of the station, areas that traditionally have not been open to the public. This area will be utilized for five distinctly different functions:
1. An HO scale model railroad that reproduces in miniature the train operations at Union Station and the surrounding Railway Lands in the mid-1950s. 2. Museum exhibition space that will focus on the audio-visual interpretation of Toronto's railway history. This space will be located in various public areas of the station, including the glass display cases known as vitrines on the eastern side of the VIA departures concourse. A permanent display will illustrate the construction of Union Station and its development over the years. Temporary displays will be developed in cooperation with the museum's corporate partners. For example, a display featuring the transportation of NHL hockey teams by train prior to the 1960s could be developed with the Hockey Hall of Fame. An exhibition on the history of the Royal York Hotel could also be developed in cooperation with Fairmont Hotels. 3. The TRHA library/archives in Union Station will house historical documents focusing on the history of railways in Canada, with a primary emphasis on the Toronto area. Members of the TRHA executive are in possession of several significant document collections that will eventually come into possession of the Toronto Railway Heritage Centre. The TRHA has arranged for the storage of the archives of the Toronto & York Division of the Canadian Railroad Historical Association and the Upper Canada Railway Society, and is assembling a comprehensive archive of the United Aircraft TurboTrain. It is intended that these archives will become an important tool for scholars, railway historians and enthusiasts. 4. The museum administrative offices of the Toronto Railway Heritage Centre will be located at Union Station. While the museum's collection of rolling stock, locomotives and other large artifacts will be mostly housed and displayed at the roundhouse, Union Station will be very much integrated into the museum's mission to interpret Toronto's railway heritage. The two sites are connected by a ten-minute stroll through the Skywalk. 5. The museum gift shop will sell railway themed merchandise as well as books and periodicals related to railway heritage. These publications are generally not available in bookstores and can only be purchased at out-of-the-way hobby shops or by mail order. With the enormous pedestrian traffic at Union Station, the TRHA expects that the gift shop will be well patronized. The shop will offer an opportunity for the TRHA to feature unique items relating to rail heritage in Toronto. |