Caption: The opening of the Bloor-Danforth subway line in February 1966 put a lot of the TTC's older PCC streetcars out of work, notably most of the air-electric cars in the A1-A5 classes (numbered 4000-4299, built between 1938 and 1945). Many of the surplus cars were initially stored at carhouses and yards around the system pending possible resale to other transit agencies, while some remained active. During an Upper Canada Railway Society visit for a tour of Hillcrest Shops, some of those surplus PCC cars are visible outside, stored on temporary tracks in Hillcrest Yard. Shop employees are busy laying and welding rail together on the old recreation field at the northeast corner of the property (near Davenport and Bathurst) to lay temporary tracks to store them out of the way on. Car 4017 (a 1938 A1-class PCC) is pictured on the left in the closest row of cars.

Alas, since many other North American agencies had already abandoned or replaced their streetcar systems with buses, there wasn't too much of a demand in the market for secondhand streetcars. About 141 cars were sold to Alexandria, Egypt in 1966 and 1968 and shipped overseas, and 9 other cars sent to an agency in Mexico in 1971 (both groups including some secondhand ex-Cincinnati A10 cars), but almost all of the others were scrapped. The particular ones stored here don't appear to have been resold and most were cut up around the fall of 1969 (aerial imagery shows at least 60 PCC's had been stored in this area in 1968 and 1969, with all cleared out by 1970). A few remaining stragglers from the A2-A5 classes remained in service until the last retired in 1972, leaving only the newer "all-electric" PCCs (43/44/4500's) and the secondhand cars (most of which dated from 1946/47).

TTC's first PCC, car 4000 (that wasn't in this lot, but was on-site for attendees on this day, as well as Peter Witt car 2766) was retained as a training car and eventually donated for preservation. It's currently a part of the Halton County Railway Museum's collection, and the only one of the original A1-A5 PCC cars to survive.

John F. Bromley photo, Dan Dell'Unto collection slide.