Today, the Globe and Mail mentioned the first electric rail system in Canada running between Thorold and St. Catharines in 1887.
In the column, writer Jack Denton noted:
"It was a summer afternoon in Toronto when the first electric streetcar to grace the city’s rails left the front of City Hall. The Globe newspaper reported that crowds watched the car’s progress, huddled at intersections along the Church route, as it made its way across downtown and up Sherbourne Street without stopping. A party, replete with countless toasts, greeted the car and its passengers from the Toronto Railway Co., the precursor to the TTC, at the terminus. The festivities to greet the first streetcar were over after 5 p.m. – “a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon having been spent by all.” All marked the August debut as a great success, and the next two years would be spent converting the rest of the network’s horse-drawn streetcars to electric variants. While not the first electric streetcar in Canada – that credit goes to a line connecting St. Catharines and Thorold, Ont., five years earlier – the streetcar that rumbled those few blocks through downtown in 1892 marked the start of a new era in Toronto transit, laying the rails for the iconic Red Rockets that would come to captivate the imaginations of tourists and residents alike."
ThoroldNews ran a history column on this back in January under our 'Remember This' category. Read that history column here.
