| •
| At
one time with a fleet of 745 cars, Toronto was the largest operator of PCCs in
the world. |
| •
| Eventually
only 19 Toronto PCCs remained and these were used on only one route — the
Harbourfront Line. The Toronto PCC era ended on December 8, 1995, when the last
such cars ran on that line. |
| •
| These
PCCs were built in 1951 and extensively rebuilt by the TTC in the early 1990s,
making them the equivalent of almost brand-new streetcars. |
| •
| Not
wanting to see these last PCCs scrapped, John Landrum helped Tom Twigge, a Toronto
Transit Commission employee, form a coalition of streetcar museums to save the
remaining cars from being scrapped and new find homes for them. MATA bought two
of the cars: 4613 and 4614. |
| •
| The
total cost for the two PCCs, including transportation, was about $15,000.00 —
a bargain considering that each of our restored streetcars cost us about $150,000
to $200,000. |
| •
| We
had the cars shipped by rail to DART's maintenance and storage yard in Dallas. |
| •
|
In May 1996, shortly after the PCCs arrived, MATA volunteers unloaded them from
the flat cars and set them on wooden cribbing in the yard.
|
| •
| The
Toronto cars ran on a track gauge of 4' 10 7/8". DART offered to re-gauge the
trucks to standard 4' 8 1/2" gauge for us, but for various reasons that project
was delayed. |
| •
| In
2002, when the Tandy subway closed, we bought two sets of standard gauge PCC trucks
from them. We painted the trucks and put them under the PCCs, allowing the cars
to be moved into covered storage. |
| •
| Since
the cars are single-ended, we will not be able to use them until our extension
to the south is complete. We will then have loops at both ends of the McKinney
Avenue streetcar Line. |
