Kitchener railway station

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Kitchener Station.

Kitchener station is a railway station in Kitchener, Ontario. It is located slightly to the northeast of downtown Kitchener, at 126 Weber Street West, near the corner of Victoria Street. It is essentially a waiting room and ticket stand built beside a set of tracks also used as a freight yard. A separate building to the east of the passenger area, originally built in 1925 as a freight building, now serves as the headquarters for the Goderich-Exeter Railway.

The station is served by six VIA Rail trains daily (three in each direction) running between Sarnia (via London) and Toronto. One Grand River Transit bus route stops next to the station.

The station was built in 1897 by the Grand Trunk Railway to replace a smaller station built in 1856. The station originally included a prominent clock tower. A second tower was added to the station after a 1908 fire. In 1966, Canadian National Railway (CN), by this point the owner of the station, removed the clock tower and the other roof features. In 1983, CN threatened to demolish the station, but VIA Rail, who had assumed responsibility for CN's passenger services in 1978, opted to retain it. Under the provisions of Canada's Railway Station Protection Act, it was designated a railway heritage structure as of February 15, 1994.

As part of a plan which also includes building a light railway through Kitchener and north to Waterloo, Grand River Transit have proposed relocating VIA to a new station closer to their Charles Street bus terminal in downtown Kitchener, where they would interchange with a number of GRT routes, intercity buses, and hopefully also GO Transit. An environmental assessment for the light railway is currently underway, but there is as yet no funding or construction schedule for the project as a whole.

[edit] References

Prose contains specific citations in source text which may be viewed in edit mode.

Brown, Ron (2002). The Last Stop: Ontario's heritage railway stations. Polar Bear Press, Toronto, Ontario. ISBN 1-896757-19-7.
Savage, Dave (1994). Directory of Railway Stations of Ontario. Canadian Station News, Cobourg, Ontario. ISBN 0-9699091-0-1.