History
In 1996, CN abandoned its Newmarket Subdivision from Bradford north to Barrie as well as its entire Meaford Subdivision which runs from Barrie to Collingwood. CN had plans to rip up its tracks, however the City of Barrie and the Town of Collingwood stepped in to purchase the lines to maintain their rail infrastructures. Barrie purchased the remainder of the Newmarket Sub, the Meaford Sub from Barrie to Utopia in Essa Township and the remainder of the abandoned Beeton Subdivision which runs south from Barrie to Innisfil and connects with the other two subs at the old Allandale Yard in Barrie. Collingwood purchased the rest of the Meaford Sub from Utopia on.
In 1998, the BCRY was started to service various customers in Innisfil, Barrie, Colwell, Angus, Stayner and Collingwood along the Beeton and Meaford Subs. The line crosses the Canadian Pacific (CP) at Utopia, and a small interchange and maintenance yard was built there. This is where Maintenance Of Way (MOW) equipment and the locomotive are stored when not in use. The Newmarket Sub is not used by the BCRY; it was purchased to preserve future GO Transit expansion north from Bradford, which re-opened in late 2007.
In 2006, the first rail spur in Ontario since 1990 was constructed to service a new customer, a lumber company in Barrie.
Read more about this topic: Barrie Collingwood Railway
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“History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.
In Beverly Hills ... they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.
Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.”
—Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)