A PCC streetcar on the Harbourfront line, May 2009
By turning on the power on the overhead wires, the work is now essentially complete on the section of the St. Clair Avenue streetcar right-of-way between Vaughan Road and Earlscourt Loop at Lansdowne Avenue. TTC streetcars are now conducting tests in preparation of the next “board change” on Sunday, December 20, when revenue service will be resumed.
On Saturday, there will be a free special public opening from 11AM to 4PM between Bathurst and Lansdowne (but not including St. Clair West Station). As a special treat, according to local councillor and TTC Vice-Chair Joe Mihevc, both remaining TTC PCC streetcars (4500 and 4549) will provide the service for this special event. The PCC heritage fleet is rarely pressed into service in the winter months, so this is a rare opportunity for some fans to see these vehicles.
(As an historical footnote, the St. Clair Car was the first TTC route to be equipped with PCC cars, back in September 1938.)
Work west of Lansdowne Avenue is still slowly progressing, though this stretch is relatively short and should be done in mid-2010 (finally!). This last phase of construction has resulted in sometimes severe traffic congestion at the intersections of Old Weston Road and at Keele, delaying both the 512 bus shuttle and the 41 Keele local buses.
It has been a few weeks since I have been to Bathurst and Dupont, so I am curious whether the track and bridge work has been completed to facilitate “dead-head” moves of streetcars between the Roncesvalles Carhouse and the St. Clair line. Updates from our readers would be appreciated.
12 comments
It’s possible the PCCs are being stored at Hillcrest. There was a recent exchange on stevemunro.ca about the feasibility of creating a third full division at Hillcrest to service St. Clair, Spadina and Bathurst especially once maintenance moves to Portlands. This would make sense because it would reduce non-service travel to the other two carhouses.
I drove down Bathurst last evening – the south-bound lanes under the rail bridge near Dupont are still closed and it looks like there’s still some major reassembly to be done.
There will continue to be unreasonable delays between Old Weston Road and Keele for cars with the narrowing to one lane at the old railway underpass which needs to be replaced but which hasn’t yet been planned. One broken down car and the thoroughfare will fail, which isn’t good news at all.
the ttc still moves streetcars through bathurst and dupont despite the bridge construction. cops block off bathurst to facilitate moving streetcars between hillcrest and bathurst station. depending on which rails are available under the railroad bridge, sometimes the streetcars move backwards instead of forwards during the trip.
a few months ago they moved a streetcar southbound from hillcrest that pre-dated the pccs — it seemed to be in great shape!
Yeah, it looks like that underpass at Bathurst won’t be done in time. The northbound tracks are done, so streetcars can be moved there with no problems, but the southbound side of the bridge is still a mess.
At night streetcars will likely be stored at Hillcrest and maybe some at St. Clair West. I’ve read that if needed, they can be driven in reverse down Bathurst St on the northbound tracks and turned around at Bathurst Station, but as you can imagine this can only be done late at night and is a huge pain.
I’ll just be a grump and point out again that while Toronto would have a lot more than two PCCs left if the TTC hadn’t decided to bless half the Harbourfront fleet unto freaking Kenosha:
http://kenoshastreetcarsociety.org/today.aspx
Any chance we can buy these back? I mean, Kenosha is a bit of a mess right now given the US economic climate (http://bit.ly/6cw7Vv) and maybe they’d like to trade in the cranky PCCs for some only-driven-on-Sundays CLRV’s at a discount instead. It’s seriously worth asking.
@iskyscraper – they would have to be converted back to Toronto gauge first – Kenosha runs on 1435mm. Maybe we could interest Kenosha in some nice shiny new Flexities though, so someone else can help prop up Thunder Bay and not just Torontonians.
The TTC will be likely short on streetcars when St. Clair and other routes closed due to construction open up next year.
There are rumors that the two PCCs will be put into service on a daily basis.
The TTC doesn’t have any “only-driven-on-Sundays CLRV”. Just lots of driven-16-hours-per-day-for-30-years CLRVs. I might make sense to the TTC to buy back the PCCs from Kenosha to use until the new streetcars start arriving.
I was being sarcastic. It’s bad enough that the TTC didn’t buy Newark’s old PCCs when they had the chance ten years ago, but to have also dumped their fully refurbished PCCs onto a Milwaukee suburb…. it’s enough to drive a native Torontonian mad.
Script for A Streetcar Named Ineptitude:
Take the largest streetcar net between Melbourne and Europe, then ignore it and treat the vehicles like buses, keeping them in traffic and off the rail map. Make sure not to create any sort of historic/loop line that would please the tourists and circulate around downtown. Then plan to build some sort of disjointed pseudo-tram lines on top of it (Transit City) while keeping 1950s payment methods, boarding procedures and station spacing so that LRT, subway and streetcar enthusiasts are all left unsatisfied. Also try to botch any construction projects so that the biggest boosters, businesses and residents along the route, become sworn enemies.
So much potential, wasted. I pine for thee, TTC streetcar. Guess I’ll just go ride one in one of the 40 or so American cities that are learning the value of big steel wheels on the pavement. (http://bit.ly/564ryp)
The TTC didn’t “dump their fully refurbished PCCs on to a Milwaukee suburb” … the cars were purchased by a broker at auction and re-sold to a third party who made them available to Kenosha when it expressed interest in creating a vintage streetcar line. If the broker hadn’t made a huge effort to see the cars dealt to museums and Kenosha … the other bidder for the cars was the scrapper, so you can figure out where they would have gone. TTC management circa 1995 deemed the cars to be surplus in the face of declining ridership and couldn’t get rid of them fast enough.
@Darwin
Please don’t repeat the rumour that the TTC will put the PCCs in service. I just finished mopping up the blood from the vessel that popped when I heard that the first time.
Nothing against heritage streetcars per se, and I like the idea of a downtown circulator on say College-Church-Queen-Bathurst or something like that, but to follow the “bendy tracks” controversy with 60 year old streetcars in revenue service seems like a bit more provocation than is wise to inflict on St Clair, a line which should have been rebuilt as a showcase for Transit City including the first of the new streetcars.
The fact is that the TTC have downplayed the availability rates of streetcars (247 claimed in the Service Summary for November 2009 but only 180 available for the AM rush – and even that sounds optimistic). The Commissioners have failed to press TTC Staff on just how many streetcars are basically parked up for good. That 180 number is likely to decline further since the Articulated fleet will now not be given a life extension. Two PCCs will not solve the looming streetcar availability gap.
I stand corrected. I should have written “to see their fully refurbished PCCs end up in a Milwaukee suburb…”.
There is a lot up in air re streetcars in Toronto – I just want to see them come out top rather than beat up, again.