Bittersweet memories of Halifax's last trolley driver
At 85, with the kind of ambulatory issues that make walking, for now, near impossible, Bill Forbes stays close to home these days.
There, he likes to keep mementoes of his long, eventful life handy.
On the dining room wall, for example, is a painting of the exterior of the Forbes general store, a sign in the window advertising 35-cent-per-loaf bread, that he once owned at the corner of Falkland and Maynard streets in Halifax’s north end.
In the hallway are beforeand-after shots of the west-end Halifax house he renovated by hand and where he and his wife Barbara raised their four kids and still live.
Out in his workshop hangs a black and white photograph of Forbes, who was a bigger man 52 years ago.
In it you can see the pride in the face of someone who always loved to don the uniform of a Halifax trolley coach driver, which, he declared, “was better than the fire or police department by a longshot”: the neat black jacket tailormade at the Isnor Brothers men’s store, the polished gold buttons, the clipped tie, the natty peaked hat with the pin for long service.
Once you understand the occasion when the picture was taken, you can see a hint of sadness, too.
In it, Forbes stands at the Young Street terminal, now the site of an Atlantic Superstore, a few minutes past midnight on New Year’s Day 1970. He had just pulled in behind the wheel of Trolley 243, on Route 7, which ranged far across peninsular Halifax.
It was an auspicious occasion: that day the City of Halifax took over the public transportation service from Nova Scotia Light and Power Co., and a new fleet of diesel buses replaced the electric trollies that had been transporting the good citizens of the city since 1949.
The man in the picture, Bill Forbes, had been given the honour of driving the final trip on Dec. 31, 1969, by the last electrically powered trolley coach to ever run in this province.
FORWARD PROGRESS
In the newspapers at the time, the transition was styled as a step into the future.
But not to Forbes, who, in the photograph, can be seen removing the number 7 sign from the trolley.
“That was the best job I ever had,” he told me the other day. “When it ended it was like losing your friends.”
He meant Eric Davison, the visually impaired mechanic who took the bus to and from his mechanic’s job, where the Bengal Lancers stables now stand on Bell Road.
But also the bingo players bound for the Olympic Gardens and the nurses getting on and off work at the Halifax Infirmary.
The folks working uptown, as the Gottingen Street commercial strip was then known, and downtown along Barrington Street, some of whom Forbes knew by name, others just because they boarded his trolley with such regularity.
“I never dug too deeply into their business,” said Forbes, “but we always said hi to each other and exchanged a few words.”
There wasn’t time for an old-fashioned chin wag. Forbes sold tickets, made change and punched and handed out transfers to and from other routes.
There was no power steering, which meant he had to work hard to wheel his trolley along Halifax’s streets.
When we spoke, it took Forbes a few minutes to verbally trace the route that began at Buckingham Street, where Scotia Square now stands, before heading down to Inglis Street, up Spring Garden Road, along Barrington, Brunswick and Gottingen streets, then weaving north until eventually ending at Leeds Street, at which point he turned the trolley around and reversed the process.
Mostly he worked the night shift, from 3:15 p.m. until midnight.
Time passed quickly on the job. By the time Forbes pulled into the terminal, all the wheel turning could leave a fellow tired out.
WORK ETHIC
But he was no stranger to hard work: after his father died, Forbes left school at 16 to support his family, who lived on Maitland Street.
His first job was as a grease monkey at Harry Holmes’s Texaco station, earning him the princely sum of $11 a week.
“I kept $3 and gave the rest to Mom,” he said.
But he made $72 weekly — plus the free use of a car — a few years later when he had worked his way up to service manager at Atlantic Garage on Agricola Street.
When that business was sold, Forbes became the youngest guard then employed at Rockhead Prison, at the corner of what is now Leeds Street and Novalea Drive.
He didn’t stay there long: one day some inmates threw a blanket over his head so that they could administer a beating. When Forbes returned home, an entire sleeve was ripped off his jacket.
Barbara said that was that. So, for a while, he found work driving a transport truck. Then, in 1958, when an opportunity arose to drive a trolley bus for Nova Scotia Light and Power, he applied.
The starting salary was $72 a fortnight.
“Nothing great,” he said. “What really drew me was that it was supposed to be a wonderful family organization.”
And so, after seven weeks of training, Forbes’s name was on the spare board, which meant filling in when the regular drivers were sick, on vacation or needed a break, where it stayed until he had enough seniority for his own route.
PERSONAL GROWTH
Forbes thinks of those days often, he told me: the fancy driving that had to be done on the city’s sometimes precarious streets, the sparks that would routinely fly where the trolley poles connected to the overhead wires, the delight he took in being a part of what he called “the best transit service in North America.”
Mostly the people: the coworkers, who he represented as the local business agent for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, but also the tens of thousands of riders whose tickets he punched in 14 years on the job.
“There was mutual respect,” he said. “Never any trouble, even if someone had been drinking.”
The way he tells it, things changed when the municipality took over. Routes were altered, not for the better.
A couple of years later, management tried to take away the two daytime shifts the union leader then worked, leaving him just working nights.
“I could see the writing on the wall,” he said.
To protect his city pension, in 1972 he took a job that had recently been vacated by his father at the Halifax Public Gardens — and has never stepped inside a Halifax transit bus since.
Forbes took a liking to the work, starting out edging the walkways and cutting the grass, eventually becoming the Gardens’ “first certified gardener” and, for two of his 18 years there, head gardener.
“Great,” Forbes said of his gardening days, although not as great as being behind the wheel of a trolley.
Look hard at the photo that he keeps in his workshop and you can see that, too.