Toronto Belt Line Railway

Toronto Belt Line Railway

The Moore Park station in 1909
Locale	Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Dates of operation	1892–1894
Track gauge	4 ft 8 1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge
Headquarters	Toronto, Ontario, Canada

The Toronto Belt Line Railway was built in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in the 1890s. It was constructed as a commuter railway line to service and promote new suburban neighbourhoods north of the city limits. It ran in a loop to Union Station through the communities that eventually became Rosedale, Moore Park, Forest Hill and Swansea. The line was never profitable and it only ran for two years. Today, as part of a rails-to-trail project, the remaining part of the line is now the Beltline Trail.

The railway was built by railway entrepreneur James David Edgar, a politician and railway financier. The railway was necessary because many of the current bridges did not exist at time, and access to areas like Moore Park was very difficult, requiring repeated trips up and down steep ravine roads. Belt Line Railway brochures used 'Spring Valley' instead of 'Mud Creek' as the name for what is now Moore Park Ravine.

As a result of a booming real estate market in the late 1880s, the Toronto Belt Line Company planned to develop land in the suburbs. Thus, it built the commuter railway to connect these new suburban areas to the city.

Passenger service first began on July 30, 1892, ran for 870 days before it ceased on November 17, 1894. The railway never made a profit. There were a number of reasons for this - the fare prices were too high at the time (25 cents between any two stations) and the country was experiencing a financial depression in the 1890s. The drive to develop these new communities was blunted by the depression of 1893, and it took longer to open up the new neighbourhoods than the developers had hoped. Also, electric streetcars of the Toronto Railway Company along with radial railways such as the Metropolitan Street Railway were providing more direct routes to downtown.