Trolley Thursday 1/13/22 - The Toronto Railways (Part 1)

What more can be said about the city of Toronto? It's the capital of Ontario, it's Canada's most populous city, and it's the one place everyone thinks of when they imagine the big cities of the Great White North. But among the canyons and crags of Toronto's skyscrapers lie another large and iconic transit system: the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC). This modern municipal railway may seem so old and permanent like its contemporaries such as the San Francisco Municipal Railway and the Chicago Transit Authority, but not so. Out of the ashes of several different private street railways, the TTC rose like a phoenix to become the iconic home of Peter Witts, PCCs, and CLRVs we know today, and on today's (belated) Trolley Thursday, we see how the TTC first got formed in the Queen City where "diversity is strength".

    

Omnibuses in Ontario

A Lego Replica of the Williams Omnibus by Transit Bricks,
sitting outside of St. Lawrence Hall, one of the original terminals.
(Transit Bricks) 

    Toronto's public transit aspirations first began in 1849, when local cabinet maker and undertaker Henry Burt Williams formed the Williams Omnibus Bus Lines. Figuring that his bus line could cover you from birth until death, his bus line responded to the motley variety of jitney stagecoach operators running through a city of barely 10,000 people. Using his skills as a cabinetmaker (and coffin maker), Williams' omnibuses were said to be more comfortable and spacious than the stagecoaches of the day, almost tomb-like (ok I'll stop with the death puns) as they plied their route between the St. Lawrence Market and the Red Lion Inn. By the 1850s, Williams was running eight omnibuses all over the city, becoming the dominant transit force, and it did not take long for the city of Toronto to respond.

The Toronto Street Railway

The "Haddon Car", resembling what appears to be a
Central Park horse-drawn carriage on rails, from 1859. 
(Henry Ford Museum)

After seeing the Williams Lines get so bogged down due to Toronto's growing population, the city issued a transit franchise for a horse-drawn street railway. The stipulations of the contract were a 16-hour daily schedule (14 hours in winter), headways of no more than 30 minutes, and speeds not to exceed 6 miles per hour. There were also no discounts for children on the already-generous 5-cent fare (equivalent to $1.46 in 2020). The franchise winner came from Alex Easton, a native of Philadelphia who came to the Great White North to form a new street railway with the help of local business owners. Easton also brought with him designs for his own horsecar, the "Haddon Car", that was to be used by his new Toronto Street Railway (TSR). On May 29, 1861, the TSR was granted a 30 year franchise and the first route between St. Lawrence Market to Yorkville Town Hall was finished by September 11 of that year.

Horsecars meet on the corner of King and
Church Street in Toronto, year unknown.
(Public Domain)

This first route paralleled Williams' original route, which had the unfortunate side effect of forcing Williams out of business. In 1862, he sold his omnibus line to the TSR and returned to cabinetry and undertaking. In the meantime, as the second route between Yonge and Dundas Streets (the latter now Ossington Avenue) via Queen Street was operational by December 1861, a funny thing was beginning to get noticed by a lot of people. Instead of depending on the usual "standard gauge" used by streetcars at the time, or a narrower "cape gauge" used by cable cars and most horsecars, Toronto's trolley gauge came out to an odd 4 feet, 10-and-7/8ths inches. Many reasons abound as to why, from disabling the steam railroads to use their tracks through the city to ensuring horse wagons could run in the rail channels during winter or in heavy, muddy rains, but no real reason could ever be found. Thus, the infamous "TTC gauge" was established.

Depoele's overhead trolley collector system patent illustration,
using an enormous wheel to capture electricity from a loose wire.
He's getting there, don't worry.
(Tramway Information)

    In the 1880s, another establishment came to Toronto: electric lights. John Joseph Wright, an English immigrant and electrical engineer, set up the Toronto Electric Light Company in 1883 to sell light bulbs and provide electrical infrastructure in the city. One of his most iconic projects that same year was building an electric railway for the 1883 Toronto Industrial Exhibition, intended to prove that electricity could not only power a house, but a street railway as well. Wright worked with known Belgian-American inventor Charles Van Depoele to get the street railway operational. The line's first iteration in 1883 did not work as planned, but by the next year, a line between the TSR's King-Exhibition line at Strachan Avenue to the Exhibition itself (serving as a shuttle line) was established. Thought Wright wanted the line to run on a third rail, Depoele's overhead trolley pole eventually won out and, by 1885, the line had carried 50,000 passengers, proving to the TSR and city officials that electricity could take over the slow, smelly horses.

Toronto Railway Company No. 1706 is one of the oldest Queen City streetcars
in preservation, and can now be seen operating at the Shoreline Trolley Museum
of East Haven, Connecticut.
(Shoreline Trolley)

The Toronto Railway Company

A Toronto Railway Company single-truck "summer car" at
Van Horne and Dovercourt Streets in 1899.
(Unknown Author)

   After the Toronto Industrial Exhibition had run its course, the city was able to take stock of much needed improvements to its public transit system. By 1891, the Queen City had grown from 44,000 people when the TSR's franchise was granted to 55,000. The horsecars had just about had it as far as passenger capacity was concerned. When the franchise expired on May 16, 1891, the city attempted to take over the TSR and create a municipal transit line. However, while the intentions were there, the still-profitable TSR blockaded the city by ordering all of its streetcars off the streets until a guaranteed buyout price of $1.4 million dollars (or $40.8 million in 2020) was aged to by the end of May. Once Toronto had paid the price, the city now had its municipal transit line but felt that it was too risky to run it themselves due to base inexperience and the sour taste of the TSR. Thus, it fell on the new businessman consortium-led Toronto Railway Company (TRC) to be granted another 30 year franchise and take over operation. 

A Toronto Railway Company "Maximum Traction" car on the King Street Route in an unknown year.
The muddy roads lend credence to Toronto's old nickname of "Muddy York".
(Transit Bricks)

Sir William Mackenzie, father
of the Canadian National Railway.
(Public Domain)

    One of the first things out of this new deal was the total electrification of Toronto's Streetcars, which took place between September 21, 1891 (when the TRC was formed) and August 16, 1892. The franchise stipulated that electrification had to be finished within one year, and the TRC was able to do it successfully thanks to the machinations of one Sir William MacKenzie (1849-1923). A major railway entrepreneur, MacKenzie would go on to finance the building of Canada's second transcontinental railway system between Vancouver and Cape Breton that eventually became the Canadian National Railway. Before all that bigger railway history could happen, though, Mackenzie's interests were more local than most as the TRC began taking over other independent streetcar lines like the Toronto & Mimico Electric Railway & Light Company (which ran on Lake Shore Road) in 1894 and the Toronto & Scarboro Electric Railway Light & Power (along Kingston road) in 1895. These two lines formed a basic suburban radial network that ran until 1904, at which point the lines were sold to the Toronto & York Radial Railway (another Mackenzie enterprise with Sir Donald Mann, his Canadian Northern Railway cohort) and divested off the main.

A Toronto & York Radial Railway car on Yonge Street,
southbound after crossing Sherwood Avenue, 1912.
(Special Collections, Toronto Public Library)

 A Rex's Chocolates map of Toronto's streetcar systems 
as of 1912, considering both the TRC and TCR.
Larger, more legible version here.
(Public Domain)

    Of course, not everyone took to the TRC with eagerness. When the TRC succeeded in a city vote that enabled them to run on Sundays, churches feared that the streetcars could lead their congregation down a path of sin, deviancy, and vice that included "sporting events" and the sale of "alcoholic beverages" on any given Sunday. Toronto also did not succeed in implementing Pay-As-You-Enter (PAYE) farebox systems in its streetcars as it was dropped in December 1910 due to "rider objections". By far, the biggest problem with the TRC, of course, had to be Sir William MacKenzie himself, as he used his profits from his heavy-rail operations to finance the TRC's stellar public image. When he fell on hard times as the Canadian Northern Railway was being built, so too did the TRC suffer. By 1915, the railway had fallen into disrepair and MacKenzie was a very tired and broken man, while the TRC's growth into Toronto's newer neighborhoods were stunted over whether or not to invest when their franchise was about to expire. 

The Toronto Civic Railways

The St. Clair carhouse under TTC ownership and filled
with derivative Peter Witt cars, 1930s.
(Torontoist)

    After a lengthy court case involving this stunting, the TRC argued that they had no business to expand past the city's 1894 borders on which their franchise was written in. While the courts agreed with them, the city did not and, upon their review in 1921, Toronto declined to renew the TRC's franchise and left the railway to fend for itself until they expired as another star company rose to take over. Being formed in 1912 as part of a group of nine other independent streetcar lines running through Toronto, the Toronto Civic Railways (TCR) was created by the city to run through the newer neighborhoods that the TCR refused to serve, and thus could be considered Toronto's first actual municipal streetcar line as it was run under the City's Department of Works, Railway and Bridge Section. The TCR had five lines: Gerrard, Danforth, St. Clair, Lansdowne, and Bloor West, and all five fell into either the Danforth Division (east), the St. Clair Division (mid-city), and Bloor West Division (west end), named after their respective carhouses.

Preserved Preston Car Co. single-truck No. 55 from the Toronto Civic Railways,
now operating at the Halton County Radial Railway Museum.
(David Arthur)

One of the first purchases made by the new TTC was 
the famous Peter Witt streetcar, and more on them next week!
(Torontoist)

    The main issue with the TCR though was despite serving new neighborhoods that the TRC couldn't, the Civic Railways was still hampered by having each line be insular from both each other and from the TRC. When cars needed to be moved from carhouse to carhouse, temporary tracks to the nearest TRC line were built to facilitate this. City annexations also meant that the Civic Railways came to own other formerly independent radial railways and streetcar lines, including the Toronto & Mimico, Toronto & Scarboro, Metropolitan Street Railway, and the Toronto Suburban Railway. Due to this immense madness and weight carried by the TCR, the city was eager to combine everything into one convenient transit package, facilitated by the TRC's franchise expiration in 1921. After putting their intentions to a city vote on January 1, 1920, citizens decided that a fully-municipal streetcar system was what the city needed. On September 1, 1921, the TCR, the TRC, and all those other confusing acronyms were all flushed away as a new organization made itself known: the Toronto Transportation Commission. 

No logos, but the name was plastered on many streetcars and buses.
(Chuckman's Nostalgia)

  

Thank you for reading today's Trolley post, and watch your step as you alight on the platform. My resources today included "A Brief History of Transit in Toronto" by Transit Toronto and the photo credits under each caption. The trolley gifs in our posts are made by myself and can be found under “Motorman Reymond’s Railroad Gif Carhouse”. On Tuesday, we continue our story as we look at the famous cars and modern operations of the TTC. For now, you can follow myself or my editor on Twitter, buy a shirt or sticker from our Redbubble stand, or purchase my editor's self-developed board game! It's like Ticket to Ride, but cooler! (and you get to support him through it!) Until next time, ride safe!