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    The TTC Story: The First Seventy-Five Years
    The TTC Story: The First Seventy-Five Years
    The TTC Story: The First Seventy-Five Years
    Ebook229 pages2 hours

    The TTC Story: The First Seventy-Five Years

    By Mike Filey

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    About this ebook

    Looking back over the past 75 years, there is no doubt that public transportation has played a major role in the development and maturing of Toronto and its metropolitan area. Indeed , despite the fiscal challenges facing it, the TTC today remains a transit agency with an enviable reputation.

    The TTC Story:The First Seventy-five Years, by Mike Filey, features over one hundred magnificent black and white images selected to illustrate the principal "transit" event in each year of the TTC’s existence. The photographs have been selected from the Commission’s vast archival collection by its knowledgeable archivist, Ted Wickson. Each event is fully described and put into its local, national, and worldwide historical context through the use of entertaining and informative text.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDundurn
    Release dateOct 1, 1997
    ISBN9781554883578
    The TTC Story: The First Seventy-Five Years
    Author

    Mike Filey

    Mike Filey was born in Toronto in 1941. He has written more than two dozen books on various facets of Toronto's past and for more than thirty-five years has contributed a popular column, "The Way We Were," to the Toronto Sunday Sun. His Toronto Sketches series is more popular now than ever before.

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      Book preview

      The TTC Story - Mike Filey

      Etobicoke.

      INTRODUCTION

      It’s funny how what goes around, comes around. For example, when the city’s new public transportation authority was established seventy-five years ago, it came into being under a cloud of dissension. The TTC’s proposed new adult fare was just too high. In fact, at seven cents the fare was a whopping 40 percent over what the previous operator, the privately owned Toronto Railway Company, had charged. And based on the service, or rather lack of it, even that nickel fare was regarded as excessive. What was even more upsetting was the fact that this new operator was the city itself, the new Toronto Transportation Commission having been created following acceptance by the voters of a referendum placed on the 1920 municipal election ballot asking if the transit-weary citizens wanted to get rid of the private operator and replace it with a municipally controlled transit authority. With 90 percent of the voters responding in the affirmative (21,700 versus 2,281), the wheels were in motion to have the recently established Toronto Transportation Commission (renamed Toronto Transit Commission in 1954) officially take control on September 1, 1921.

      Now, three-quarters-of-a-century later, the ever-present fare increase issue is but one of the many challenges facing the Commission as it enters upon its diamond anniversary year. Cross-border transit service in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area), long-term funding sources for regular and special transit needs, improved service reliability, and continuous upgrading of the Commission’s enviable safety record are but four of the others.

      In fact, not one of these challenges is new to the TTC. Over the past seven-and-a-half decades all sorts of demands have been placed on the Commission; and each time the challenge has been met. And while we, the citizens of Metro, will remain the greatest critics of the system, visitors to our city as well as transit experts from all over the world will continue to praise our TTC. But, I guess it has always been the case; as we all know, the grass is always greener . . .

      What follows is a selection of photographs from the TTC’s vast archival collection, each one selected by the Commission’s archivist, Ted Wickson, another transit enthusiast who I have known for years, to illustrate what he believes best illustrates the technical or operational highlight of that particular year. In many cases the main theme photograph is augmented by material from other sources to better document the event.

      And while the TTC remains one of the safest transit operators in the world, accidents unfortunately do happen. While these events, too, are part of the Commission’s history, references to them have been intentionally excluded. Such documentation is better left to a comprehensive history of the TTC.

      My desire to document the TTC’s first seventy-five years of existence is something I came by honestly, having first used its services when I was but seven years of age. Back then it was the only way I could get to and from the nearest branch of the public library, way up near the St. Clair and Bathurst intersection, from the family third floor flat at 758 Bathurst Street, half a block south of Bloor. Helped across busy intersections by sympathetic pedestrians and put into the care of the Bathurst streetcar operator, my quest for the pleasures that reading could bring was definitely made easier by the good old TTC.

      And if it was raining my own version of the TTC would quickly become my source of companionship. Using metal Dinky toys, some string, plasticene, and match sticks I would construct my own version of the streetcar system on the floor of the rear sun-room. Incidentally, just in case you were wondering, the Dinky toys were the streetcars, the string the overhead, the plasticene formed the frogs or switches in the overhead and the under-running trolley wheel. The match sticks? The trolley poles, of course. Now you, too, can play streetcar.

      The TTC also helped sharpen my business acumen. Whilst nestled in the single seat directly behind the kindly operator, I would always ask if I could have the stubs, the priceless packages of glued transfer ends that were usually discarded into the little waste paper container beside him. With an ample supply of these treasures, I, too, was able to operate my own transit system using a tricycle with a wagon hooked on behind as my streetcar and trailer. Oh, by the way, in case you get the wrong idea, I did this years ago while still just a kid. Today, my ‘trike’ is simply too small.

      Mike Filey,

      April 1996.

      TTC 1975 AJP

      TTC 15996 ASG

      TTC T-3 ASG

      Public transportation problems prior to the TTC.

      TRANS 405 AJP

      TTC 50017 ASG

      TRC 687 AJP

      THE TTC STORY

      THE FIRST SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS

      TRANS 173 AJP

      Looking South on Coxwell Avenue to Queen Street on the day the new Toronto Transportation Commission went into business.

      1921

      Work on the rehabilitation of Toronto’s decrepit street railway system was well under way even before the new Toronto Transportation Commission officially assumed responsibility for municipal public transit on September 1, 1921. The TTC’s first construction project had actually commenced on July 26, 1921, at the corner of Danforth and Coxwell avenues when a crew of thirty men began laying a second track alongside a single track installed eight years earlier by the TTC’s precursor, the Toronto Civic Railways, to connect the Danforth with Gerrard Street. Work started at the north end of Coxwell since city crews were busy further south at the Queen Street corner widening that intersection. Once the Danforth-Gerrard section was completed, TTC crews began double-tracking the Gerrard–Queen stretch of Coxwell and on September 1, the date of this photogrpah, were busily installing the Queen-Coxwell switches. Work was completed on September 22, and on October 2, 1921, the TTC’s first new streetcar route, Coxwell, began operating over the new track.

      TTC 61025 AJP

      Newly acquired double-deck motor bus enters service on Humberside route.

      Private entrepreneurs continued to offer transportation services in the outlying areas using vehicles like this jitney bus seen on Weston Road south of Eglinton Avenue.

      1922

      The Humberside motor bus route opened on September 20, 1921, and provided a connection between the streetcars on Dundas and the Runnymede Road district with buses operating on Humberside and High Park avenues and Annette Street. Prior to the introduction of the TTC’s first bus service on the new Humberside route, Torontonians had only ridden this kind of vehicle when a few enterprising citizens operated jitney buses during periods of labour unrest that had resulted in regular streetcar service being interrupted. Jitney comes from a slang word for a five-cent

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