Did you just hear Judy Garland singing?
That title brings back memories of Judy in Meet Me in St. Louis, of course, but this day-trip excursion brought back all kinds of memories from my early life -- memories of growing up as a kid in Toronto.
This picturesque place is the Halton County Radial Railway, located in the forested countryside northwest of Toronto and Burlington, just a few kilometres away from the village of Rockwood. It sounds a bit remote, but is actually easy to get to with a bit of driving -- about 15 minutes, or a bit less, northwest along Regional Road 1/Guelph Line from Highway 401.
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Source: Google Maps
This volunteer-run preservation and display museum, originally founded in 1954 and first opened to the public in 1972, covers a wide range of the streetcars which used to form the backbone of public transportation in Canadian cities before World War Two, although a large part of the collection comes from Toronto. Also included are historic buses and subway/interurban railway vehicles.
The centrepiece of the Halton County Radial Railway is an actual working railway, a two-kilometre stretch of track which was once part of the Toronto Suburban Railways. This fully electrified working rail line includes turning loops and stations at each end, and rides through the woods are offered throughout the day, using an assortment of vehicles, whenever the museum is open.
These photos show the rides being operated on the day I went. The first is #2984, a "Peter Witt" streetcar which was the backbone of Toronto public transit between the two great world wars of the last century.
This Peter Witt car would almost certainly have been retired before I was old enough to notice. One of the last great strongholds of the Witt cars was the Yonge Street streetcar line, and it gave way to Canada's first subway when I was just a few months old. By the way, the Witt looks like a double-ended vehicle but actually is not. These cars were often known by the nickname "Red Rattler", and you can get a bit of an idea from the soundtrack of this video clip, showing the car going around the loop at the far east end of the museum's line.
The other two rides were PCC cars, and I rode on this one, # 4611, twice.
The initials PCC stand for "Presidents' Conference Committee," a consulting body of leaders of major transit networks which set the basic design. These vehicles began coming into service just before World War Two, and in the end Toronto operated more of them than any other city -- nearly 800 vehicles in total. Many came to Toronto, used, from other cities where streetcar tracks were being ripped out and replaced with buses -- Cleveland, Kansas City, and Birmingham, to name just a few. These were the streetcars as I knew them when I was a child.
Did it look like this inside when I was young? Definitely not. These cars were given a full rebuild on the interior half a dozen years before they were retired for good, as the 1990s-vintage seats and the dark brown paint and woodgrain-laminate side walls clearly show. The dome lights, the "No Smoking" sign behind the motorman, and the railings by the entrance stairs are all old original design. My favourite feature in childhood was always the single seats along one side, and I was sitting in one of them as I took this picture. Buses and subways certainly didn't have seats like that when I was young -- only the streetcars!
One of the key design goals for the PCC was to make these new cars quieter than the noisy Red Rattlers. I'll let you judge for yourself how well this goal was achieved.
But the PCC cars were definitely faster! They became the first generation of street railway vehicles in Canada to achieve a top speed of 80 km/hour, and thus earned the new nickname of "Red Rockets."
Although you will buy tickets earlier at the gift shop or on line, your ride starts at the Rockwood Station, a genuine old railway station. Originally built in Rockwood in 1912, it was moved the 6 kilometres from the village to the museum on a large flatbed truck in 1971. The gift shop sells admission tickets, which allow you to ride all day, as well as snacks, souvenirs, drinks, and ice cream (that last item especially popular with kids of all ages). At the east end turnaround loop, the smaller Meadowvale Station also has a snack and ice cream bar. You're welcome to get off there and walk around, visit the decorative garden inside the turning loop (that's where I took the video footage), sit at a table, and enjoy the sun until you get the urge to hop on a streetcar for the ride back.
The rides are the highlight, but the property also has a number of large car barns, where volunteers work on restoring and rejuvenating many vehicles, some for riding, and some for display only. Barn # 4 is the static display hall, and the collection there is even more diverse. Here are just a few examples.
First up, # 327, a working replica of one of the very earliest electric streetcars in Toronto. The design of # 327 is basically a powered adaptation of the open-sided horse-drawn summer streetcars which predated the electric age.
Another prized exhibit is # 4500, the very first PCC streetcar in Canada. This one is beautifully cared for indeed, and with good reason -- it just joined the museum's collection a year ago and is now almost 90 years old. Compare to the pictures of # 4611 above and you'll see multiple differences in door design, destination signs, and window size and shape. The basic PCC template went through many such variations in different cities, and quite a few of those different looks ended up in Toronto.
Another relic, an open-air summer car from London, Ontario, presents a wild contrast to the sleek streamlining of the ALRV articulated car behind it, a type which has only been retired from service in Toronto for a few years.
This oddly-coloured PCC vehicle, # W-30, was used for track inspection and rail grinding to keep the entire system moving as smoothly as possible. Again, you get the contrast with the ALRV directly behind.
But back to my memories. The prize of the whole collection, for me, is the presence of just two of the original Toronto subway cars of 1954 -- the only two survivors of these old originals. And there it is -- the best seat on the train, the seat right beside the driving cabin, which was always a favoured destination as soon as you got on the train. As kids, we used to run down the platform to get to the front end before the train arrived so we could get that seat -- and then enjoy the view throughout the ride.
The whole look of the car, from dome lights to plush upholstered seats, from narrow aisles to green-painted walls, is worlds away from today's successors. Speaking of successors, these remain the heaviest subway cars ever to serve in Toronto, even though they are considerably shorter than all subsequent subway vehicles. Helps to explain why these eight-car solid steel trains were so much louder than trains made up of their aluminum successors, trains which are the same overall length but with only six cars.
I completely forgot to take an exterior picture of these landmark vehicles. But all is not lost! Here is a picture I took in 2011, fifteen years ago.
It's a pity that you can't go out for rides on this one any more -- it was used for rides when it first arrived at the museum, but is looking a bit the worse for wear now.
As I was leaving, after several fascinating hours, I made an impulse decision to go north to Highway 7 before heading home. Just as I was driving into the village of Rockwood, I saw multiple walkers strolling along the shore of a lake at the roadside. That hooked me, and in short order I was walking myself in the Rockwood Conservation Area.
This lovely park has multiple campgrounds, plus hiking trails, picnic areas, and the beauty of the lake -- which is actually a reservoir, controlled between dams at the upstream and downstream ends. The various mills in Rockwood thrived in earlier days on the water power of the fast running waters here.
Without further ado, a quick picture show of my walk in the park, starting with a video panorama of the lake taken from the west end.
Although I'd never been there before, it was late enough in the afternoon that I settled for just a short stroll, as I still had the 80-minute-or-so drive home to contend with. But I definitely want to return for a much longer walk -- and another visit to the streetcar museum wouldn't go amiss either!
These links will take you to get the detailed information about both of these attractions:
