Читать книгу Toronto Sketches 12 - Mike Filey - Страница 11

July 15, 2012

I’m pretty sure that by now anyone who drives the streets throughout downtown Toronto is aware of the ongoing closure of the busy Queen and Spadina intersection. And those TTC passengers who ride the 501 Queen streetcar will be given a special treat each day for the next week or so as they discover other parts of the downtown core as their vehicle manoeuvres around the closed intersection. It’s all part of a major improvement program to upgrade sections of the Spadina streetcar right-of-way prior to the introduction of the TTC’s new Legacy model vehicles later this year. Similar improvements and modifications to other parts of the system to accommodate the new Legacy cars are to come.

The history of street railway service on Spadina goes back more than 130 years to the day in 1878 when horse-drawn streetcars operated by the privately owned Toronto Railway Company (TRC) began carrying packed passenger cars over steel rails that had recently been laid on the stretch of Spadina Avenue between King and the fast-growing community around the Spadina and College intersection.

The city continued to expand northward, and in 1883 the Spadina route was extended all the way north to Bloor Street in order to serve what had only a few years earlier been rural countryside.

Then, in 1891, the Spadina line was incorporated into what the TRC had established as the Belt Line, a route that ran horse cars both ways on

Bloor, Sherbourne, King, and Spadina, forming a “belt” around the city. On December 15 of the following year, the horse cars operating on the Belt Line were removed and newfangled electric streetcars introduced. This was the city’s fourth all-electric route.

Looking north on Spadina Avenue over Queen Street in 1924. Note the streetcars-only right-of-way down the centre of Spadina. The building on the northwest corner of the intersection was the site of one of the city’s first silent movie houses. It was called the Mary Pickford Theatre in honour of the world-famous Toronto-born movie star. The present building houses a McDonald’s restaurant.

Road and streetcar track repairs all up and down Spadina Avenue are nothing new. These men are hard at work in the summer of 1902, and note, doing it without today’s mandatory safety equipment. In the distant background is Knox College, thankfully still a city landmark. The streetcars are operating on the popular Belt Line route.

(Both photos City of Toronto Archives.)

In the summer of 1923, the new Toronto Transportation Commission, not quite into the second full year of its mandate, discontinued the Belt Line and introduced a new Spadina route on which it operated double-end electric streetcars, initially between Bloor and Front and then, after 1927, over a new bridge that carried traffic over the busy railway corridor that still exists. An interesting feature of the TTC’s new Spadina streetcar line was the fact that it featured double-end streetcars and crossover tracks at either terminus, thus precluding the need for loops to change direction. A similar way of changing direction will be featured on the new Eglinton Crosstown, Sheppard East, Finch West, and Scarborough RT light rail routes, all of which are scheduled to open in or before 2021.

Streetcar service on Spadina came to an end (but, as it would turn out, only temporarily) in the fall of 1948 when a serious shortage of electricity throughout the province prompted the TTC to replace the Spadina streetcars with buses.

Then, in a rather strange turn of events (especially in light of the fact that the TTC had decided to eliminate all of Toronto’s streetcars by 1980 before reconsidering and deciding instead to retain its streetcars), plans were announced in 1992 to convert the Spadina bus route back to streetcar operation. This new streetcar route began operating on July 17, 1997.