Lonely silos on Hamilton’s east Mountain is where past and present meet

It's the last thing you'd expect to see among the sprawling housing surveys and industrial parks on the east Mountain off Dartnall Road.

But there, in a patch of waist-high grass, is a lonely reminder of days gone by, an abandoned concrete grain elevator that looks like it belongs on a Saskatchewan prairie.

For much of the 1900s, the Rymal Station was a bustling place. Farmers in the Hannon/Mount Albion area would grow farm animal feed and truck it to the station where it would be stored in silos. From there, it would be put onto CN trains and transported around the country.

But development pushed back farming and grains and trains slid into decline with the station finally closing in 1993.

The railway line was handed over to the Hamilton Conservation Authority and six years later, the tracks were pulled up to make way for the 12-kilometre Chippewa Rail Trail for people to walk and ride bicycles.

The vacant grain elevator from the 1920s was left behind along with a former co-op building from the 1940s that is currently being used by a company called Integrated Market Solutions. A small terminal from the original station built in the 1880s was torn down in the 1960s.

The two remaining buildings are located beside the rail trail between Rymal and Stone Church roads, just east of Dartnall.

It's kind of where the worlds of the past and the present meet," says Matthew D'Angelo, 23, who has formed a citizen's group called Rymal Station Heritage" to try to repair and reuse the decaying former elevator as part of the trail system.

Rymal Station was the first proper railway station on the Mountain," he says. It was a key part of the city's expansion up the escarpment."

D'Angelo has been in discussions with the conservation authority and hopes to someday see the building used as a mini-museum to remember the area's agricultural history. In April, he started a Facebook page that has become a popular destination to share stories and photos about the station.

Geoff Chrysler recalled how my late father Richard Chrysler and I built a huge model railway of the CN Hagersville (railway line) that Rymal (station) was a part of. Our model depicted the summer of 1950. I built the structures at Rymal and did much of the scenery."

He says the intricate model railway built in the 1990s is long gone, but he fondly remembers the endless hours he spent with his dad on the project.

We'd go to all the regional flea markets and train shows and collect hundreds of period photos," he says. We collected regional fire maps, railway blueprints and timetables ... We even conducted interviews with old ex-railway workers."

D'Angelo came to learn about the former freight station, while riding his mountain bike on the rail trail.

He lives in the nearby Templemead neighbourhood with his folks and recently finished a college program in early childhood education. Held back from finding a job because of COVID-19, he's spent vast amounts of time researching the area's agricultural history.

Right now it's all new development, but back in the day there was a lot of farmland and the station was a big industry. Feed for animals would be grown, harvested into trucks and brought to Rymal Station. They would use an elevator belt with buckets and scoops to carry the grain into the silos."

And then the feed would sit there waiting for trains to carry it away to be dispersed around the country."

He feels something needs to be done quickly because over the past two years there has been a lot of vandalism. I think it is too important a landmark to see that kind of thing happen."

So, he approached the conservation authority to see what can be done.

Matthew Hall, the director of capital projects and strategic services for the authority, says keeping the site secure is difficult.

It's an area that is a bit problematic for us. We don't have a lot of manpower to go around there very often," he says. I guess our position right now is that if we can do something that makes sense to stabilize, restore and maintain it in a better way than we have been able to do over the last ten or 20 years, than that would be a good thing in our opinion."

D'Angelo will be making a formal presentation soon, and Hall says he is hopeful something will come from it perhaps with the authority and volunteers working together on the project.

This could be the start of something really interesting for us," he says.

Mark McNeil is a Hamilton-based freelance contributing columnist for The Spectator. Reach him via email: Markflashbacks@gmail.com