It's 1971, and you're the Toronto Transit Commission. After following the thirty-year-old trend of other North American cities and gradually elminating your streetcar fleet, you've come up against a hastily but effectively organized group of concerned Toronto citizens, inspired by the successes of other activists against the Spadina Expressway. They want you to keep the streetcars running into the next century. Wisely, you agree, bucking the longstanding trend, and you abandon your streetcar abandonment policy. However, being so progressive, you suddenly find yourself with an aging streetcar fleet in need of replacement amongst a continent that has largely given up its streetcars. You need a new fleet, and there's no off-the-shelf model available. What do you do?

This is precisely what happened to the TTC in the early 1970s when it was convinced by concerned citizens to kill its policy of abandoning its streetcars by 1980. The venerable PCCs where now well over 30 years old, in need of replacement, but there
was no easy answer as to what that replacement would be. So, the TTC abandoned one more line, Rogers Road (replaced by trolley buses in 1974) to ensure that they had enough PCCs to stock the system while they embarked on an extensive rebuilding campaign. In the meantime, the search was on for the new generation of streetcar, that would trundle along Toronto's
streets into the next century.  Enter the Ontario government, who had already acted in support of

Toronto citizens by killing the southern portion of the Spadina Expressway. To encourage the TTC in fostering growth of public transit, it organized a crown corporation named the Urban Transit Development Corporation (UTDC. UTDC set to work on building a replacement. The TTC agreed to place an initial order for 200 new vehicles, ten prototypes of which would be designed and built by a manufacturer in Switzerland, before design and manufacturing was transferred to Thunder Bay, Ontario. The ten Swiss models were cut down to six (which is why there are no CLRVs numbered 4006-4009) in order to experiment on an articulated version of the design (see the ALRV page), and the new cars started to arrive in 1978.

Revenue service began on September 30, 1979 on the Long Branch route. As deliveries continued, this was followed by Bathurst (February 29, 1980), St Clair (incl Earlscourt, April 16, 1980), Kingston Road (June 9, 1980), Downtowner (August 7, 1980), Queen (January 4, 1981), King (July 20, 1981), and finally Dundas and Carlton (October 23, 1981).

The CLRVs' European styling was quite different from the Art Deco subtleties of the PCCs, and they didn't arrive without their teething problems. Passengers complained about the inability to open windows (a design feature to enhance the air conditioning) and the seating arrangements (angled front seating in the first six cars was modified to the standard seating style of the remaining cars in 1981).  There were concerns about wheel noise (fixed by installing PCC components in the wheel sets), fears about the couplers snagging pedestrians unlucky to be hit by the cars (safety shields installed in 1984, and couplers removed by 1988) and complaints that the new single rollsign system needlessly eliminated the traditional route names from the streetcars' fronts, turning them into route numbers (nothing was done). Still, the public gradually got used to the new vehicles, and they now comprise the bulk of the TTC's streetcar fleet. The TTC kept its promise, and found the streetcar that will take the fleet well into the next century.

CLRV (Canadian Light Rail Vehicle) designed by the Urban Transportation Development Corp. (now a part of Bombardier). , except 6 prototype cars (4000-4005)

Principal Specifications:

Fleet numbers: L1 Class - 4000-4005 (built by SIG in Sweden), L2 Class - 4010-4199 (designed by the Urban Transportation Development Corp. (now a part of Bombardier)

The following 190 cars were built by Hawker-Siddeley Canada) in Thundaer Bay O

 
Seating: 46
Normal service usage: 102 passengers - 29,685 kg
'Crush' load capacity: 132 passengers - 31,735 kg
Empty streetcar weight: 22,685 kg (50,000 lbs)
Minimum horizontal curve radius: 10,973 mm (36'0")
Minimum verticle curve radius - convex: 122 m
Minimum verticle curve radius - concave: 244 m
Motor rating: 2 x 185 HP continuous, 245 HP in acceleration, 370 HP in braking
Initial acceleration rate: 1.47 m/s/s (3.3 MPHPS)
Braking rate: 1.6 m/s/s (3.6 MPHPS) in service, 3.46 m/s/s (7.7 MPHPS) in emergency

Information from:
http://transit.reliantwebhosting.com/

Updated June 13, 2000