page_title: Don Mills Trail
section_title: Rail
hierarchical_section_title: Don Mills Trail / History / Rail
caption_attribution_description: English: A warehouse siding that used to be served by the Oriole Spur prior to its abandonment in 1999. In 2017, the siding still had much of its track still in place. The track stops are about 45 metres east of the spur's former ROW.
context_page_description: The Don Mills Trail is a 3-kilometre cycling and walking trail in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The trail runs south from York Mills Road, east of and roughly parallel to Leslie Street. The city built the trail on the roadbed of a former railway line, known as the Leaside Spur.
  The trail is situated within the Don Mills neighbourhood of Toronto. None of the trail is within Leaside, although that was the destination of trains that used the former Leaside Spur. The Don Mills Trail is not to be confused with the Lower Don Trail, also within Toronto.
context_section_description: The trail uses the 100-foot-wide (30 m) roadbed of the Leaside Spur (also known as the Leaside Cutoff and the Oriole Spur), a former railway line that connected Oriole on the CNR Bala Subdivision with Donlands on the CPR Belleville Subdivision. (Oriole is at York Mills Road, and Donlands is about 450 metres north of Eglinton Avenue East.) The Canadian Northern Railway (CNoR) built the line originally to access the CPR North Toronto Station. (However, CNoR/CNR passenger service to North Toronto Station never occurred.) The Leaside Spur opened on February 1, 1918; it was 2.18 mi (3.51 km) long. The CNR purchased the spur in 1918 after the CNoR became financially insolvent.
  The Leslie Spur provided access to the CNoR's shop complex at Leaside, which included a roundhouse, a large locomotive shop, a passenger coach shop and other buildings. The complex replaced an engine house in the Don Valley at Rosedale that had limited capacity and was vulnerable to flooding. CNoR trains from downtown to Leaside needed to go north through the Don Valley to Oriole then south on the Leaside Spur. The Leaside locomotive shop opened in 1919, and there was a transfer table between it and the passenger coach shop. With the merger of the CNoR into the CNR, the complex became redundant and was closed in the 1930s. The locomotive shop survives today, and is occupied by Longo's Leaside supermarket on Laird Drive.
  The CNR used the Leaside Spur to interchange freight with the CPR and to serve local industries at Leaside using a small yard there. The CNR once had running rights to switch industries on the north side of the CPR midtown line all the way to the TTC's Hillcrest Complex at Bathurst Street. There also used to be a few sidings serving industries along the spur, including one with much of its track still in place as of 2017. See photo.
  The CNR abandoned the spur in 1999.
  In April 2009, the Province of Ontario purchased the Don Branch (running between downtown Toronto and Leaside). GO Transit was considering rerouting its Richmond Hill line trains over the Don Branch and the Leaside Spur in order to avoid the Bala division south of Oriole which is vulnerable to Don River flooding. The idea was dropped when the City of Toronto purchased it for a key link in the bike trail network, now the Don Mills Trail.
  There was one bridge on the Leaside Spur over Bond Avenue; it took 6 years to construct between 1912 and 1918. The abutments are concrete slabs 9.5 ft (2.9 m) high. Six 2-foot-thick (0.61 m) beams span the 15-foot-wide (4.6 m) opening, spaced to handle the weight of locomotives and heavily loaded railcars. Sitting on the steel beams were twenty-one 8×8-inch (20×20 cm) railway ties, spaced 4 in (10 cm) apart for drainage. The bridge is now used by the Don Mills Trail.
caption: Warehouse siding once served by the Leaside Spur (2017 photo)
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