Ride The Rails With Benny Plant

If you look carefully at the picture (click on it to see it full size) to the left, you will see an older Bradford Station sign from CN days gone by. Originally called Ontario, Simcoe and Huron Union Railroad, it opened for travel all the way from Toronto on June 13, 1853. The Aurora Station had just opened on January 7, 1853. Look closer and you will see to distance mileage on either side of the word “Bradford”. Toronto 42 miles and North Bay 186 miles. Then see the Bradford GO sign on the light pole. Talk about the old and the new! Not sure when North Bay opened up but it must have been a while after Bradford. I think it’s great that they kept the old sign

As luck would have it, my dad’s car broke down a couple of weeks ago as we investigated two “refer” rail cars on a seldom used siding at Dominion Produce in Bradford right near the Go Station. What a pain, tow truck drivers and all. It turned out to be a late night after what should have been an outing of discovery about the Bradford Veggie Train. Having decided to contact Dominion Produce directly we discovered that the “Veggie Train” brings carrots from California during the late winter and early spring. This happened to be one of those times…early June. When they run out of stored material from the previous fall’s harvest from Ontario, they call up California and subsequently receive two car loads of carrots which are washed and bagged (5 or 10 lb bags). Then it’s off to A&P/Dominion, Loblaws, IGA and so on. Having heard the horns at 4:00 AM in the morning, it was told to us that CN brings up the cars late at night, they are unloaded the next day and then CN picks up the cars the next night and takes them back to the MacMillan yard. It all happens at night. Bummer! There is no schedule. It is only as needed and all arranged by e-mail with CN. Another mystery solved!

Newmarket Urban Legend has it that there is a twice a week Veggie Train that goes up and down between Toronto and Bradford twice a week late at night. How can that possibly happen on a “Go” only line and why only at night? Don’t vegetables grow during the day? We find scant evidence of this legend but yet we hear these loud horns at 4:00 AM in the morning blasting through the house and we hear also from the the guys at PNR that the Veggie Train exists but we’ve never really seen it. It’s kind of like Bigfoot or The Loch Ness Monster. We’ll keep searching and keep you posted