Rail versus bus — how best to get from here to there
The scene depicted in our old photograph this week played out near the west end of St. Paul Street.
The date was probably sometime in the early 1940s, judging from the vintage of the cars that appear in the photo. It seems like just an ordinary morning or afternoon rush hour, with cars parked along both sides of the street and a city bus and an N.S.&T. rail car heading toward the viewer and on to the city centre.
I like to think of those two transit vehicles as sort of jostling with one another for the right of way, competing for the patronage of the city’s workforce, because that’s more or less the scenario that played out in this city and in this region from the 1930s into the 1950s.
The first city-owned buses were added to the local transit system in February 1929. So popular were they that pretty quickly some of the popular N.S.&T. rail routes were discontinued in favour of bus service — the line to Niagara-on-the-Lake in January 1931, the Low Line service between St. Catharines, Merritton and Thorold in May 1931, and eventually streetcar service within St. Catharines in February 1939.
That transition from rail to bus would likely have continued steadily throughout the 1940s, but the advent of the Second World War late in 1939 altered the volume and patterns of local transportation, so much so that much of the previously discontinued rail service was restored in 1942.
However, once the war ended in 1945 the history of the N.S.&T. was marked by one steady refrain: “replaced by buses.” That’s what happened to the Facer Street and Victoria Lawn lines (March 1946), Lundy’s Lane beyond Main Street in Niagara Falls (May 1947), the Victoria Lawn and Ontario Street lines (September 1947), interurban service between St. Catharines and Niagara Falls (September 1947), the remaining streetcar service to Niagara Falls (November 1947), St. Catharines to Port Dalhousie (February 1950) and, finally, the interurban line to Thorold–Fonthill–Welland–Port Colborne (March 1959).
As regards the context of this old photo: this scene played out somewhere at the west end of St. Paul, near the bottom of William Street. The most recognizable landmark in the photo is the Phelan’s building in the background. Phelan’s sold and repaired tires, pumped gas and provided a range of other auto services, operating from one end of a row of mid-19th-century commercial buildings that stood on Ontario Street at the intersection with St. Paul.
The Phelan’s building was demolished in 1963. It stood right next to where you will today find the assemblage of huge boulders and obelisks formally known as The Gateway (more commonly known as “The Rockpile”), dedicated there in June 1987.