Caption: On June 19th 1965, John Bromley was present at the TTC's Greenwood Yard to photograph brand new TTC H1 subway car 5350 being unloaded from its flatcar at the pit track. Shirts appear to be optional on this warm June day as workers ready the car for unloading. At the time the TTC was taking deliveries at Greenwood of new H1 subway cars from Hawker Siddeley in Thunder Bay, ordered for the new crosstown Bloor-Danforth subway line (to open next year, in Feburary 1966) even though the yard was still under construction at the time (note the large ballast piles and stacks of ties in the background).
The H1 subway car bodies were delivered without trucks, so "shop trucks" were slipped under the body at each end. Here, one has already been installed under the rear (blind) end of the car, and one waits on a small trolley to be slipped under the front end on the right. Once the shop trucks are installed, the TTC's red Whiting trackmobile will pull the car off and run it around the bottom of the yard loop track into the shops. The flatcar it's riding on is CP 313003, one of a handful converted from old heavyweight sleeping cars (more info in this photo) to transport new subway cars from MLW and HSC. The pit track the flatcar sits on is standard railway gauge (a siding from CN's Kingston Sub), but the ramp and yard tracks are all TTC gauge (slightly wider, done intentionally to prevent railways from operating over city streetcar tracks),
Two years later, TTC 5350 would be loaded back up onto a CP flatcar for shipment to Thunder Bay for repairs in July 1967, after a sideswipe accident with a Gloucester train damaged the first 1/3rd of right side of the car. It would return and transport the citizens of Toronto underground for over three decades until the H1 fleet was retired en masse in 1997-1999.
John F. Bromley photo, Dan Dell'Unto collection slide.
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