Scarborough RT - History

History

In 1972, the provincial government announced the GO-Urban plan to build an intermediate capacity transit system across suburban Toronto using the experimental Krauss-Maffei Transurban. The system failed to function to come to fruition, and the TTC began building the line for CLRV streetcars, but the ICTS system was used instead, because the Province of Ontario agreed to pay a large portion of the costs. This change was made after construction had commenced. At Kennedy Station, there are clues revealing that it was originally built for streetcar operation; it is possible to see old low-level streetcar platforms protruding under the current high-level platforms, and Kennedy Station originally had an operational loop to turn streetcars. This proved too sharp for safe operation of SRT cars, which did not have a reason to turn around, and the loop was replaced by a Spanish solution-like crossover. Ontario wanted to develop and promote its new technology, which was originally designed for a proposed urban GO Transit service known as GO-ALRT. Changes to federal railway regulations had made the new system unnecessary for GO, and so the government hoped to sell it to other transit services in order to recoup its investment.

The Scarborough RT opened in March 1985. Three years after it opened, the TTC renovated its southwestern terminus at Kennedy Station, because the looped turnaround track, originally designed for uni-directional streetcars under the earlier plan and not needed for the bi-directional ICTS trains, was causing derailments; it was replaced with a single terminal track and the station was thus quasi-Spanish solution, with one side for boarding and another side for alighting, though the boarding side is also used for alighting during off-peak hours.

The line has seen no extensions since it opened. Many transit advocates believe that it would have been wiser either to build it using streetcars, as was originally planned, to allow for lower costs and more flexibility in route options or simply to extend the underground Bloor–Danforth line further into Scarborough (for more details, including the proposal to combine it with the Eglinton Crosstown line, see Future below).