Isn’t an HSR without rail like KFC without chicken?
The story behind Hamilton Street Railway’s confusing name
People who have moved to Hamilton in recent years must scratch their heads every time a bus drives by.
Why is the city’s public transit system called Hamilton Street Railway?
The “Hamilton” part makes sense. “Streets?” There are lots of those. But “Railway?”
You could ride every piece of HSR transportation equipment, and not one of them will have rails underneath.
So what gives? Isn’t an HSR without rail like KFC without chicken?
Well, the short answer is there used to be streetcars. Lots of them. That’s how the name came about. But 69 years ago, the last ones were put out of service, but the HSR name was kept.
And it’s got to the point now that, of the more than 200 electric streetcars that operated over 75 years, there is only one known vehicle that hasn’t been melted down or rusted into ruin in a field somewhere.
That last remaining piece of transit history was rescued in the 1970s after being used as a chicken coop at a Beamsville farm. The streetcar is called No. 521, operating with the HSR from 1927-1951, and it’s currently stored at the Halton County Radial Railway Museum on Guelph Line in Campbellville.
Some people there have faint hopes the rusted relic will someday be restored. But more about that later.
So how did the transit system in Hamilton, so built around rail, come to turn its back on the transportation mode so completely?
Toronto kept its streetcars. But what happened in Hamilton?
“There was a perfect storm of things going on in Hamilton,” says Tom Luton, a public transit expert who runs an extensive website devoted to the history of local public transit.
By 1951, he says, the system was in a terrible mess of broken down infrastructure. And the HSR’s owner at that time was Canada Coach Lines, a bus company that wasn’t so much interested in rail transportation.
Here’s the streetcar timeline:
In 1874, the HSR began with streetcars on rails pulled by horses.
In 1892, streetcars began being powered by electricity.
In the 1930s, the system became run down because of the financial meltdown of the Great Depression.
In the Second World War, the HSR further declined because of a scarcity of metal and a lack of workers available to do maintenance.
By 1951, the situation became critical and the streetcars were eliminated. Overhead lines were converted for trolley buses, and the rail system was paved over. Regular buses ran the rest of the system. Another factor in the demise of streetcars, says Luton, is that they became viewed as an obstacle to automobiles that were escalating in popularity.
In December 1992, the trolleys were put out of service in favour of a system that completely relied on buses.
The city is hoping an east-west LRT will be built that would see rail return to Hamilton. The plan is to have it run by a private company instead of the city-owned HSR.
Through it all, a passionate fan of streetcars has more recently emerged to begin the long road of restoration for HSR streetcar No. 521.
Trevor Parkins-Sciberras, 28, of Toronto has been working on the vehicle at the radial railway museum “restoring the face of it to start — painting the front and patching the holes.”
He has had to halt work because of COVID-19 closing the museum. But, he is confident he will be able to get back at it later this year to finish making the front of the vehicle look “more presentable.”
Once that is done he plans to start a fundraising campaign “to get the entire thing restored.”
That would involve people with a lot more expertise than he has. He figures it will cost $200,000 to make the vehicle look like it once did and a lot more than that to make it operational.
And maybe, he says, the project could be completed in time for the HSR’s 150th anniversary in 2024, the year that service began.
“It’s in rough shape, but I’m hopeful,” he says. All kinds of streetcars have been restored at the radial railway museum in the past, he says, so taking on the HSR project is not out of the question.
And if they are able to bring old No. 521 back to life, it would be a huge victory for local history preservation. Not only would it be a major piece of city transportation heritage, but it would also be a significant artifact of local manufacturing. The streetcar was manufactured by National Steel Car in Hamilton.