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Year: Construction began in 1913, the station opened in 1927.
Location: Front Street between York and Bay, Toronto.
Status: Open and active, functioning as a terminal for trains, busses
and subways.
Accessibility: Much of the interesting sights in Union Station are
outside of fare-paid areas so one can generally explore it for free. Most
of what there is to see relies on whether or not certain doors have been
left unlocked on any given day, although multiple entrances exist to the
steam tunnels and
offices.
Hazards: While we've never got ourselves in particularly deep trouble
at Union, we've been escorted in a more or less friendly fashion from the
employee parking garages more than once in the past. People we encounter in
the offices tend to ignore us and the one "bust" we had in the steam tunnels
involved a confused worker telling us he wasn't sure we should be taking
pictures down there. He gave us the name of the supervisor we should speak
to, in fact. In the tunnels themselves or some of the attic areas you could
easily hurt yourself pretty badly -- don't touch any pipes or high-voltage
errata and you ought to be fine. I mean, assuming you're cautious
in the first place.
Interesting features: Union Station offers a whole wack of
interesting stuff to see. It's got roof access, a dusty attic
over top of the main foyer, an extensive office complex with nifty glass
hallways, a steam tunnel network that offers hours of exploration, a huge
employee parking garage with connections to other nearby buildings and no
doubt loads of other wonderful things.
Recommendation: It's basically unforgiveable to not include Union
Station in any infiltration of the area. Swing by and see what's
unlocked.
August 10th, 2002
Ever since I started exploring in Toronto, I've dropped by Union Station every chance I got. Several times, I or Asher would drag a whole group of people to Union just to see if the doors to the steam tunnels would be left open, which Ninjalicious (who has his own very good page on Union Station right here) had assured us they occasionally were. I guess it depends on what kind of work needs doing, because for a few months on end the tunnel access was never open. The tunnels themselves are accessed through a big set of double-doors with a warning sign on them, tucked away in the employee parking garage not far from the entrance we normally use (an orange metal door in one of the corridors to a train platform -- it used to be unmarked but has since had the text "Employee Only" hastily stenciled on). At any rate, we had no luck at Union for some time. We pulled off a few brief explorations of the employee parking garages and once, during Doors Open Toronto, got to check out a sandy little crevice in the garages called D6, which is fairly cool in its own right. We were accidentally swept up in a passing tour group, though, in which we got our first taste of the offices but were tricked into being herded out a side stairwell before we could split off from the tour. Bastards.
Essentially our track record with Union was fairly depressing until one fine day when Asher and I were waiting to meet Krall there. It occurred to us that, having grabbed the property manager's business card on our last visit, we might be able to get an employee to let us into the offices under pretense of having to meet him. We had a little speech all worked out, but when I tried the door into the offices from the main foyer (next to a Harvey's), it just opened right up. That never happens. Asher and I dashed inside and headed straight up the big old wooden staircase into the offices proper.
We explored for some time, ending up in a few interesting, semi-disused parts of the offices, before finding a narrow stairway that went up several stories. This took us past floors 5 and 6, with a door on each one leading to what is probably a very cool set of machine rooms we'll have to check out some day, and stopped at floor 7. The door at the top of the stairs was slightly ajar, so I took hold of the doorknob and tried to pull it open (what actually happened was that I ended up holding half a doorknob and the other half clattered loudly across the floor on the other side of the door, just about sending Asher scampering back down the stairs). When I explained what stupid thing I'd just done, Asher joined me in prying the door open with our fingers. We repaired the doorknob and then took stock of our surroundings, which were truly amazing.
The room we were in was a high-ceilinged attic of some kind, with brick
walls and iron support beams criss-crossing the ceiling. Lighting was
provided by means of trouble-lights hung on extension cords in a seemingly
random pattern. Ahead of us, towards the end of the room, was what looked
like a service elevator, a door and a ladder going up. I took note of these
but was more interested in a small hole about seven feet up the wall across
from the entrance, with an old wooden stepladder leading up to it.We climbed the dodgy, shaky bastard ladder with some unease and climbed through the hole into a very different place. There were only a few lights hung up here, illuminating primarily a whole wack of support beams. There were iron beams everywhere, forming a grid across the floor that one had to step high to get over. As for the floor itself, it was somewhat convex, dropping steeply towards the left and right sides. Every few feet there was a tiny hole cut in the floor, casting light out through the ubiquitous airborne dust. Some of these holes had steel cable running through them -- up through one hole, across the floor on a set of pulleys or supports, and back down through another. These, of course, turned out to be what are holding up the lights over the main foyer, which we were directly above. Through the holes we could see people sitting around, looking for customer service or struggling with luggage seven stories below us. We were overjoyed -- what a find!
What came next proved to be stranger yet. We walked to the other end of the ceiling, where there was another small door in the wall, and walked through it onto a small grate stairway going down a few steps into what looked, at first glance, like a miniature warehouse. Asher snapped a few photos as I looked around, poking into some of the darker corners. The first thing I noticed was that it was recently populated -- messages written on whiteboards, notices and memoes hung up on corkboard, that kind of thing. The next thing I noticed was a series of ear protection warnings and a stack of human target papers in the corner. As it turned out, we'd blundered into the CN Police firing range. And we were, as multiple warning signs informed me an in imposing yet friendly manner, currently being monitored on closed circuit camera, ohh yes.
I've been in many places where I really, really didn't want to get caught, but this had them all topped. We'd only had one or two shots left on our roll of film to photograph the place anyway, so we took the last one and then fled. We still haven't got to check out the door or ladder in the brick attic, but we're informed that the ladder leads to the roof access. I feel like a fool for not checking it out first.
Asher and I pounded back down the stairs and headed to a very old-school bathroom tucked away on the fourth floor where we washed off most of the soot we'd picked up in the attic. We then gauged which exit from the offices would get us off of Union Station property fastest and headed straight for it. The last thing we needed was to be greeted by a small army of security guards who had the idea now that we just might be armed.
That was the end of that highly-satisfying excursion. The photos are still sitting around in a disposable camera and will soon be developed, honest.
Our next eventful trip to Union came about a month later. For some reason, the steam tunnel doors had been left wide open, which I'd never seen before. We waited for the population of the parking garage to clear out from that area and then darted down the stairs to the tunnels.
The steam tunnels were clearly a wonderful place. I snapped a few photos at
the T-junction we started at, then took a right and bumped right into a
worker. We tried marching right past him while I recited to Asher some
highly-technical and obviously-important problem I was having with the
camera I was clearly authorized to be using down here, but the worker
decided to take his chances and ask us Just What We Were Doing. I made
something up about working on a subterranean utility infrastructure study
for a nearby university, and explained that we were told there'd be no
problem photographing down here. Ultimately the worker told us that he was
pretty sure we'd have to go talk to his supervisor about it, although T7G (a
guy from Detroit who was visiting for a while) was pretty sure he heard the
guy tell us we were free to walk around, as long as we didn't take any
photos. God, I hope not, because I thought he told us to piss off so we
thanked him and left.Later that day we had a chance to visit the offices again and snap some photos with our New Camera but the door on the seventh floor was locked, much to our chagrin. There must have been some heavy work happening in Union because we saw contractors all over the place and almost every single "Employee Only" door I've seen in the station was wide open. We were able to access the offices on two different levels, once without even realizing it, and we were able to see their network and phone distribution facilities and other great stuff with no trouble. At the time, we just wanted back into the steam tunnels, and devoted our efforts to finding alternate entrances. Unfortunately, they were scarce and the only one we found, on the lowest floor of the offices, was still locked.
On a later journey, on which T7G missed his ride back to Detroit, we had with us ReduxZero of Edmonton Urban Exploration, with whom we decided to check out the steam tunnels again. They were open (hooray!) and this time we took a left at the first junction. We explored them for the better part of two hours, and it was a uniquely rewarding and bloody hot experience. It was in these tunnels that we found one of the more mysterious sights we've seen to date -- Asher came across a small door just off of a large room in the steam tunnels, which was heavily locked with a pair of iron bars.
When we opened it up and went through, we found a long, nicely-tiled steam
tunnel
-- the decoration that was visible was nice enough that it looked like part
of a subway platform rather than a utility tunnel -- which was almost
entirely flooded. The water was deeper than I could estimate and, for all
intents and purposes, entirely impassable. I remembered hearing about this
before (I believe Ninjalicious once encountered this almost entirely
drained, and managed to explore a ways beyond it). It was
frustrating to see so much that we just couldn't get at, and we entertained
several very bad ideas for ways to get past it. Ultimately, we ended up
just snapping a few photos and turning around, intrigued and annoyed. If
the steam tunnels stay open for a while, this will end up being what I check
every time we visit the station. If they're capable of draining it to
provide limited maintenance access or something similar, I want to know
about
it. Maybe we should bring some inflatable rafts. Now that would be
a story.At any rate, Union Station seems to just keep getting better and better. We plan to return soon and explore the other half of the tunnels and, for that matter, we've got to put up the photos from the attic and gun club.
And all of this is why you should go check out Union Station right now. :D
-snee
Update.
August 25th, 2002
James sent UEC an e-mail about what the flooded tunnel was used for. It would seem that the original use for this tunnel was to connect the TTC's Union station and Union stationTM. The corridor was, "built when the subway opened" as can be told by the "yellow vitrolite tiles," we were told. More on this later. :D
And now, a photo gallery.
.