Track through the Central Experimental Farm

Left: 1926 gov't map of trolley line into the CEF | Right: 1929 map of same line (snipped from Ottawa's Streetcars)

I've been looking for information on the trolley line that ran into Ottawa's Central Experimental Farm. As far as track plans go, all I've seen up until now has been that snippet shown above on the right (it's snipped from page 142 of Bill McKeown's excellent book, Ottawa's Streetcars).You can see it's quite schematic. I'm interested in finding out what was to be found near the track since that would be useful if I I'm going to build some sort of CEF inspired layout.

Browsing through Building Canada's Farm again I happened to see a snippet on page 144 from a 1926 map of the CEF with a tantalizing view of a sliver of trolley track on the far left of the image. I contacted the authors, explained my interest, and was kindly provided a pdf of the entire old government map from which they got their snippet. I snipped out the entire trolley line, and you can see it's a fascinating loop (you'll need to enlarge the image to get a good view). It winds through crop rotation plots, orchards, chicken coops, and a vegetable garden with tobacco plots, a vineyard, and the Dominion Observatory nearby. The remote turnaround loop encircles an auditorium and is the site of a trolley stop.

The entire trolley line is too big for an uncompressed rendition, but I'm thinking about some sort of compressed layout inspired by some features on the 1926 map. The scale would be HO, and the Tyco-based transfer trolley would run the line, but beyond that, I'm still planning.