Heritage: War Finish Engine Lathe

The engine lathe in the machine shop of the John Street Roundhouse was powered up for the first time this century on 31-January-2009

TORONTO, ONTARIO - At Saturday's work session of the Toronto Railway Historical Association at the John Street Roundhouse in Toronto, there was a surprisingly high turnout for a cold winter day. Seven volunteers arrived to help along the process of creating a Heritage Centre next to the Rogers Centre sports stadium and the CN Tower, focusing on the 1929-era former Canadian Pacific John Street Roundhouse, as occurs most Saturday mornings.

While I worked in a group of five that were preparing a rail car for future rides around Roundhouse Park, Michael Guy and Bob Dickson were soon found in the rear of the old machine shop around the engine lathe. It soon became clear that they weren't just inspecting the equipment, but were actually preparing it for use! While I wouldn't be much of a judge of the mechanical condition of any piece of shop equipment, I had always just assumed that the old heritage tools in fixed position in the machine shop would require a substantial amount of work to be useful again.


Michael Guy and Bob Dickson cleaned the engine lathe early in the session on 31-January-2009

Just a couple hours later, they were making connections in the electrical cabinet, and the rest of the work in the session came to a halt as we all wanted to see if the lathe would indeed power up again. At about five minutes to noon, the moment of truth came. There was no dust cloud; Michael and Bob had cleaned too well for that. There was no loud noise; this machine was too well-built for that. It just sounded like any other large lathe I had had heard in my life. The cover on one end was not quite in the correct position, but other than that, it could have been in daily use for the past twenty years, instead of effectively being in storage. As it rotated properly, Michael started to adjust the controls and found that, indeed, it would change speed as directed. They truly don't build things like they used to do.


Michael Guy turned on the Engine Lathe for the first time in about a quarter-century as the photographer kept his distance at the John Street Roundhouse in Toronto on 31-January-2009

So when was this engine lathe built? A clue came from a panel on the cover of the instrument, reading "War Finish." As Michael explained to me, this meant that the equipment was built during World War II, when materials were not to be wasted on the appearance of objects, as would normally be done with such a major piece of equipment as this engine lathe. A label on a storage door stated that it had been built by the Canada Machinery Corporation, Limited in Galt, Ontario. While it wasn't as old as the roundhouse itself, the lathe had likely been in this position for more than sixty years.


The "War Finish" label on the engine lathe at the John Street Roundhouse was noted on 31-January-2009

Seeing the engine lathe come to life was exactly the kind of historical event that brings the volunteers out each week to work on the Heritage Centre.

For more coverage of this event including a description of engine lathes and a video of the lathe in motion, see the official TRHA blog entry.