Toronto's most iconic landmarks would not exist if not for a suburban rail yard

Structures like the CN Tower and the Rogers Centre are known as Toronto landmarks by people across the globe, but these megastructures and so many other recognizable buildings in the city's downtown only exist thanks to a massive suburban rail yard built 60 years ago that set the stage for the 416 we know today.

Just north of Toronto's northern city limit, the gargantuan CN MacMillan Yard stretches an impressive three kilometres from north to south, and as much as one kilometre across at its widest point.

This sprawling assembly of infrastructure — bounded by Highway 407, Keele Street, Rutherford Road and Jane Street — is the second-largest rail yard in Canada, behind the Symington Yard in Winnipeg. 

While it may not be the country's largest, the 1965 opening of the MacMillan Yard served a sleeper role in one of the most transformative urban renewal projects in Canada's history, at least by association.

However, while the suburb of Vaughan would be transformed practically overnight into a key industrial hub, the yard's opening would pave the way for immense growth in other regional suburbs in the years to come.

MacMillan Yard in Vaughan seen in 2008. Photo by WestendRaider via Wikimedia Commons.

The most immediate effect of the MacMillan Yard's opening (aside from freight shipping heading to a new destination) was the freeing of track traffic along the tightly-constrained Union Station corridor. This provided the perfect opportunity for increased commuter service that resulted in the provincial government's 1967 creation of GO Transit. 

GO would quickly establish stations that further drove suburban growth with easy access to the region's primary employment centre in downtown Toronto. If you ue GO Transit today, you can thank CN Rail for building the MacMillan Yard decades ago.

Regional transit proved immensely beneficial for the region's growth and connectivity, but the most transformative effects of the yard's opening, by far, would happen in neighbouring Toronto over the subsequent decades.

CN first conceived plans to construct a large-capacity rail yard in Vaughan back in the 1950s as part of a broader plan to bypass freight traffic away from the busy rail network through Toronto.

The first train would roll through the new yard in February 1965, ahead of the facility's official opening just over three months later. Originally known as the Toronto Yard in its early years, the yard was renamed after former CN president Norman John MacMillan just a decade after it entered operation, and remains known as the MacMillan Yard to this day.

But the movers and shakers of that era probably had little idea of just what this move would allow future generations to accomplish.

So, why was this project so important to both the growth of downtown Toronto and the suburbs in the surrounding region?

The rerouting of CN rail traffic away from the city centre quickly opened up the vast railway lands south of Toronto's downtown for ambitious new projects.

This sizeable tract of land stretching from Union Station all the way to Bathurst Street offered Toronto an opportunity to extend its downtown and close a gap between the city and the waterfront.

Aerial view of the downtown rail yard in 1964, the year before the MacMillan Yard opened in Vaughan. Toronto Archives.

Visionaries wasted no time getting the ball rolling, with the CN-owned land conceived as a blank canvas to create an impressive add-on to the city centred on a massive telecommunications tower that could bounce signals over the tops of skyscrapers in the increasingly vertical Financial District to the north.

The plan was known as Metro Centre, though much of the vision was ultimately unrealized following a downturn in the market that would stifle this ambitious proposal.

 

One element of Metro Centre did make it through, though, and within eight years of the MacMillan Yard opening in Vaughan, Canadian National had begun construction on what remains known as the CN Tower to this day. 

CN Tower

And that was far from the only iconic project to rise in the city's former rail yard.

Within 20 years of the yard opening, the Metro Toronto Convention Centre had opened on the former rail yard, serving as the catalyst for even more development in the area in the years that followed.

Metro Hall under construction. Photo via Eastern Construction.

Rail yard-adjacent areas as far north as King Street West were redeveloped, including Roy Thomson Hall, opened in 1982, and the Metro Hall complex just over two decades later.

Roy Thomson Hall (then known as New Massey Hall) under construction. Photo via Eastern Construction.

The innovative SkyDome (currently the Rogers Centre) broke ground on what was once part of the rail yard in 1986, opening three years later — once again, all thanks to a rail yard in Vaughan you might have never even heard of.

Around this same time, with CN gone from the picture and the area in the midst of redevelopment, the final rail operations vacated what was left of the yard when VIA trains began using the New Toronto Yard to the west.

By the mid-1990s, construction of the Air Canada Centre (since renamed to Scotiabank Arena) was filling in more of the former rail lands.

Air Canada Centre (now Scotiabank Arena) under construction in the 1990s. Photo via MLSE.

The multi-decade construction of the CityPlace community was the final step in this new pocket of the city following the sale of the remaining lands in 1997 and the subsequent buildout of the new high-rise community from the 2000s into the 2020s.

In fact, you can still see the lasting effects of the rail yard relocation in 2025.

The soon-to-open Concord Canada House towers at Spadina and Bremner represent the final piece of the puzzle in the redevelopment of the former rail lands after 60 years.

So, while you may not have been familiar with the MacMillan Yard before today, it would be hard to picture what a modern Toronto could look like had this rail yard not been built in the 'burbs all those decades ago.

The rail yard's six-decade redevelopment unlocked a wide swathe of land for Toronto's expanding downtown. 

Generations later, another former industrial wasteland is in the early stages of a similar transformation over in the Port Lands.

Considering the city-defining changes brought on by the rail yard's long-term redevelopment, one can only imagine the major landmarks that will be built in the next chapter of Toronto's downtown expansion.