File:Impending street car crash! 2013-02-26 -abcd.jpg

I was with an impatient friend, or I would have taken more pictures of this incident. These two streetcars approached the intersection of Church and Richmond from either direction. Streetcars use Church when they short-turn -- it hasn't had regular passenger service for about fifty or sixty years. Similarly Richmond's tracks are used for short turns. What we see here is that both streetcars started to turn west onto Richmond at the same time. One streetcar was ringing its bell like crazy. Both cars were going forward -- but at a snail's pace. Some of the switches are completely manual. The driver has to get out, and use a very long metal lever to pry the switch from one track to the other, drive through the switch, stop again, and go back and reset it to straight through. Other switches however seem to be smart enough to know when to set in one direction, or another.

I was a teenager when I first saw mockups of what were then called the UTDC cars, and are now called the CLRV. They gradually replaced the TTC's PCC (President's Conference Cars) -- lovely graceful vehicles that dated back to the 1930s. The TTC keeps two in operating condition, and they can be rented for special events.

I still think of these UTDC cars as the "new streetcars" -- when they are approaching the end of their operating life and will start to be replaced in 2014.

Various companies tried to prepare more modern replacement for aging PCC fleets. Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco used the next generation American designed vehicles which seem to have been dreadful failures. When the UTDC vehicles were designed it was hoped there would be sales to other cities. There weren't -- which is a crying shame, because I think they proved to be very robust, reliable vehicles.

Of all the vehicles designed to replace the graceful PCC vehicles I think the UTDC vehicles were the one that most closely resembled the PCC vehicles.

The main weakness of these vehicles is that, like the PCC vehicles, and other vehicles designed at the same time, they still have high floors, making it impossible for people in wheelchairs to use them, and hard for mothers with baby strollers, or shoppers with granny carts to mount or dismount. Modern vehicles, like the Flexity Outlooks that will replace them, have very low floors. They will have ramps that can deploy from (some of?) the doorways so wheelchairs, strollers or carts can be rolled aboard.

This image was stitched from:

File:Impending street car crash! 2013-02-26 -a (10587906385).jpg

File:Impending street car crash! 2013-02-26 -b (10587888815).jpg

File:Impending street car crash! 2013-02-26 -c (10587985844).jpg

File:Impending street car crash! 2013-02-26 -d (10587966164).jpg