Vintage TTC streetcars could soon return to Toronto streets

[marmar]

The TTC's modern Flexity Outlook streetcars have become an iconic symbol of Toronto since their first introduction in 2014, but the transit agency still maintains a legacy fleet of heritage streetcars from years past — and there is new hope these vintage transit vehicles could soon return to city streets.

The current fleet of heritage vehicles is mothballed in temporary storage at the Halton County Radial Railway Museum while renovations are carried out at the TTC Hillcrest facility, though a new Formal Request for Bid (RFB) filed by the transit agency marks a step towards bringing these streetcars back to occasional commuter service.

According to the RFB, the TTC is seeking bids "to retrofit legacy streetcar vehicles with pantographs," referring to the rooftop devices that draw electricity from overhead streetcar wires and power streetcars.

Pantrograph retrofits are necessary to make these legacy vehicles compatible with modern streetcar infrastructure. ...............................(more)

https://www.blogto.com/city/2025/09/vintage-ttc-streetcars-return-toronto-streets/

[bucolic_frolic]

1. Iconic. We lose so much when we discard everything along the way.

They are like an Edward Hopper painting.

[Vogon_Glory]

2. Those PCC cars almost last forever

The Toronto streetcars are representative of a design that last literally for DECADES. First built in the mid-1930’s, with the last ones built in North America in 1952, they can and did run for decades, outlasting multiple generations of buses and giving the lie to right-wing penny-pinchers comparing the price of a new PCC to some bus design that lasts at most maybe twenty years before it’s worn out.

I was born in Dallas, the privately-owned transit company bought some PCCs in 1945, retired them a few years later when they abandoned trolley rails, and sold them to the MTA in Massachusetts. The MTA ran them until 1978, the PCCs outlasting their rubber tired, internal-combustion contemporaries for decades..