Port Whitby and Port Perry Railway

The Port Whitby and Port Perry Railway (PW&PP) was a former railway running from Whitby to Port Perry, running north-south about 50 km east of Toronto. It was built to connect local grain and logging interests with the railway mainlines on the shores of Lake Ontario. It was later extended northeast to Lindsay, becoming the Whitby, Port Perry and Lindsay Railway (WPP&L).

The railway was never very successful, as the original engineering was considered sub-par and reliability was poor from the start. It earned the nickname "The Nip 'n Tuck", a euphemism for something considered unreliable. The last train ran in 1939, a specially commissioned passenger train, and the rails were pulled up in 1941 to feed wartime steel production.

Reach Township started filling out in the 1840s and developed a rivalry between three incorporated towns, Prince Albert, Port Perry and Manchester. The three towns were only a kilometer from each other, lying along a roughly east-west line at the southern tip of Lake Scugog. Rivalries between the towns were intense, and Peter Perry predicted that one day goats would eat grass off of Prince Albert's main street.

Simcoe Street, a graveled toll road, had recently been constructed through Prince Albert. By 1850, Prince Albert was the second largest grain-buying market in what was then known as "Canada West" (today's Ontario). Grain and timber, the major exports from the area to the north, were hauled to Prince Albert, ganged into larger loads, and then sent southward by horse team on Simcoe Street for shipment abroad.

In the 1850s Abraham Farewell, an early advocate of the development of Ontario County through the construction of gravel roads, predicted that unless a railway was built from Georgian Bay to Whitby, control of the inland grain and timber trade would be taken over by Toronto and Port Hope interests. There had been some talk of introducing the "Port Whitby & Port Huron Railway" to pre-empt this possibility, and although a charter was granted in April 1853, no money was forthcoming and nothing came of these early plans.

...
Wikipedia