A Railway in the Village?
/As early as May 1891, the Ontario, Belmont & Northern Railway (OB&NR), a wholly owned subsidiary of the Central Ontario Railway, received a charter to build a branch line to the iron mines in the Marmora area. Construction did not start for some time, and the 14.5 km line from Marmora Junction near Belmar (marked in red), just south of the village, to the Cordova mines was finally completed in July 1896. Later that year the branch was renamed to become the Marmora Railway & Mining Company. As many as 24 trains a day ran up this line to Marmora, from 1884 to the 1970’s. The Marmora Railway and Mining Company line, later owned by the Canadian Northern Railway, eventually was consumed by Canadian National Railway. While the Marmora Station now sits on what would have been this CN line, its original position was on Station Road, on the main Central Ontario Railway line to Maynooth.
Cameron Street was laid out on the bed of this railway, as was Riverview Drive, and parts of the track are still visible to the south as the extension of Cameron Street, and in the north where it crosses Glen Allan Park Road.
In the rare photo below, taken from the iron bridge that crossed the Crowe River, you can see a train on what is now Cameron Street passing behind the houses on Forsyth Street. Mrs. William Sanderson’s outfit in that same photo dates the photo for us at about 1910.
This very early photo shows some railway cars behind the boathouses, that were common along the river bank. Boathouses were still at that location in the 1960's
