City of Victoria contractors working on bike-lane extensions on Fort Street uncovered remnants of the city’s first mass-transit network — the electric streetcar.
Workers digging near the intersection of Fort and Richmond Road found a section of streetcar line that’s been left undisturbed for decades. Another section of streetcar rails was later revealed in early July on Fort Street near Linden Avenue.
The discoveries come almost 75 years after Victoria’s last streetcar took its final journey out to Beacon Hill Park by longtime operator Walter Peddle, on July 5, 1948.
According to the City of Victoria, it’s not the first time construction crews have discovered remnants of the streetcar network. Crews have found and removed rail lines, ties and spikes over the years.
One user of a local Reddit internet forum posted a photo of himself digging up a streetcar rail spike as a souvenir.
The discovery of the buried tracks demonstrates that the contractor paid in the 1940s to dig up all the lines didn’t do the most thorough job.
An engineer’s field book provided by the City of Victoria Archives shows the work on Fort Street was supposed to be complete on May 27, 1949.
The city engineer’s end-of-year report from that year said all the tracks had been removed from city streets, with the exception of a section on Point Ellice Bridge.
The $106,399 track-removal contract had been awarded in March of 1948 to the lowest bidder: Fancher & Fancher, a California street rail removal company.
“If you look at the B.C. Archives website or the City Archives, you’ll see lots of photos of them being pulled up around the city,” said Patrick Dunae, an adjunct associate history professor at the University of Victoria. “Possibly, on Fort Street, it was just easier to pave over them.”
The Belgian-made rails on Fort Street were part of the first streetcar routes established by the National Electric Tramway and Lighting Company in February of 1890.
The route ran from Fisherman’s Wharf (then called the outer wharf) to the Jubilee Hospital and took about 37 minutes from start to finish, according to a report on the inaugural trip written by the Colonist at the time. A trip cost 5 cents.
Proving to be immensely popular from the first day of operation, streetcars would eventually take over Victoria streets and expand into neighbouring municipalities by the end of the year.
Occasionally, cows would wander onto tracks and cause derailments.
When that happened on the Esquimalt route, “the passengers, most of whom were sailors, cheerfully helped lift the streetcar back onto the tracks, then resuming their seats to continue the journey,” wrote Margaret S. Belford in a 1986 Times Colonist article.
Other accidents were much more serious. The Point Ellice Bridge disaster in 1896 is considered to be North America’s worst streetcar accident.
An overloaded streetcar was carrying an estimated 120 to 140 passengers to Esquimalt for Queen Victoria’s birthday celebrations on May 26, 1896, when the middle span of the bridge collapsed and the streetcar plunged into the water. Fifty-five people were killed.
Henry Ewert, an enthusiast of B.C.’s early electric streetcar networks and the author of Victoria’s Streetcar Era, wrote that the City of Victoria paid out more than $150,000 in claims due to its “gross negligence in failing to maintain and repair the bridge.”
Despite the tragedy, entire streetcar suburbs such as Fernwood, James Bay and Fairfield would spring up with the advent of new lines.
“If you look at real estate ads during that period, they would often say [their] proximity to the car line,” Dunae said, adding that it was desirable to live as close as possible to the vital transportation network.
John Lutz, a history professor at UVic, said the introduction of streetcars, which were then state-of-the-art technology, dramatically changed the city.
“You either walked into town or, if you’re rich, you had a horse and carriage,” he said. “But the working, middle class couldn’t afford their own horses.”
It was the streetcars that opened up Oak Bay and Esquimalt for settlement, Lutz said.
Many of Victoria’s streetcar “motorneers” — the drivers and conductors — lived in the Burnside-Gorge neighbourhood, close to the network’s hub of operations. “They were kind of a labour aristocracy. They had a lot of prestige,” Dunae said, adding that the neighbourhood was a “rather respectable” area at the time, although more affordable than Fairfield.
A predecessor newspaper of the Times Colonist played a part in the creation of Victoria’s streetcar network.
Ewert wrote in Victoria’s Streetcar Era that David W. Higgins, a former publisher of the Daily British Colonist — which merged with the Victoria Times in 1980 — was enthralled by the streetcar system he encountered in Seattle during his honeymoon.
Along with several other Victorian businessmen, Higgins would establish the National Electric Tramway and Lighting Company with the help of a $40,000 loan from the City of Victoria.
The company fell apart financially in the next six years and was purchased by business interests back east. Victoria’s streetcar network would eventually be owned by B.C. Electric Railway Company Ltd., the precursor of provincial institutions such as B.C. Hydro and B.C. Transit.
By 1913, B.C. Electric would become the operator of all major streetcar lines in the province and expand the streetcar network with interurban lines that ran as far as Deep Cove in North Saanich.
But by the 1930s, the company would struggle to turn a profit and began falling behind in infrastructure upgrades.
In 1942, Victoria’s streetcar network boasted 15 lines and carried 10.2 million riders in the capital region. But those numbers were buoyed by war-time gas and rubber rationing.
“It gave the streetcar system kind of a second lease on life,” Dunae said. “Old timers recall the streetcars in the 1940s absolutely groaning with passengers, especially the streetcar that ran out to the naval base, the dockyard in Esquimalt.”
Later, faced with the competing automobile and the expansion of roadways, B.C. Electric would begin reducing streetcar services and coverage.
“The company claimed it was more advantageous to have buses which didn’t have to be on a purposely built route,” Dunae said. “They felt it was expensive to provide new streetcars.”
After the Second World War, B.C. Electric eventually transitioned into using diesel buses to serve transit users in Victoria, a practice that B.C. Transit largely still continues on today.
A streetcar comeback?
Other parts of Victoria’s former streetcar network still remain visible in the city. The Store Street power plant used to power the trams is now home to a sustainable garment factory and showroom, and parts of the tram depot next door at 2031 Store St. have been renovated into a trendy co-working and event space.
Sections of certain roads, such as one on Niagara Street in James Bay, remain unusually wide as former streetcar turnaround spots.
But streetcars aren’t just a relic of the past. Amid growing interest in sharply reducing vehicle emissions to curb climate change, streetcar and light rail systems have been making a comeback in North America.
About a dozen systems have been built, expanded or are under construction in cities like Quebec City, Toronto, Portland and Seattle.
Recently, Colwood and View Royal endorsed finding space in the West Shore for an ultra-light transit rail system pilot project as a potential alternative to the so-called Colwood Crawl along the Trans-Canada Highway.
The last serious consideration of a streetcar network in Victoria was in 1993, when B.C. Transit paid for a $175,000 consultant study on the viability of a loop linking James Bay to the north end of downtown that would have acted as a first step toward a regional light rail transit system.
The 4.4-kilometre proposed loop, estimated to cost around $27 million, would have run along Menzies Street and Government Street and looped in front of Chinatown every six to 10 minutes.
Geoff Young, a Victoria councillor at the time, said he doesn’t recall the proposal coming before city council.
“It’s not a surprise to me that the possibility would have been raised,” Young said, adding that people have been excited by the idea of bringing back streetcars since not long after the rails were torn up in 1949.
Eric Doherty, a Victoria-based transportation planning consultant, said it would be very expensive to rebuild an extensive streetcar network in the capital region, given that the urban area now extends much further than it did 75 years ago.
Light rail transit networks need a dedicated right-of-way and to go far enough to make a difference to people’s commuting patterns, he said.
“If say, 25 years ago, we just stopped expanding highways and put that money into rail transit, we could have a light rail network already,” Doherty said.
Instead, governments have chosen to spend billions on highway expansion and starve the transit system, he said.
“We don’t have the kind of money on the table that it would take to say, build a light rail line from the legislature to Langford. That would probably be over a billion dollars.”
But a bus rapid transit line, which Doherty said is what most cities are gravitating toward to help solve their traffic problems, could be cheaper.
“For a few million dollars, we could paint bus lanes through downtown for the 95 Blink bus, plus all the other buses that go up and down Douglas.”
>>> To comment on this article, write a letter to the editor: [email protected]
