Sample of Roman Fomin’s 1926 map of streetcar and interurban map available on Transit Toronto
Transit Toronto is a great website dedicated to, well, all things transit in Toronto. In the archives section, there’s a wealth of old reports, schedules, advertisements, and official maps and track diagrams of the TTC dating back to 1930, a wonderful resource for the armchair historian or transit enthusiast.
The most interesting of Transit Toronto’s recent additions is a map (a screen shot is shown above) illustrating the entire rail transit system in Toronto as of 1926, the peak of Toronto’s street railway and interurban network. Toronto’s radial railways at their peak connected places such as Woodbridge, Guelph, Sutton, Port Credit and Schomberg. The Guelph and Woodbridge lines were operated by Canadian National Railways, while the other radials were, at that time, operated by Ontario Hydro. The map, which is a cartographic delight, was created by enthusiast Roman Fomin and includes the street and mainline railway networks as they existed in that period. I was only able to spot a few trivial errors in this extremely detailed work.
In 1926, there were only a few short TTC bus routes that are not shown on this map: on Jane and Annette Streets, in Rosedale, the Port Lands (replacing the Ashbridge streetcar that’s partially shown on this map), and on Oakwood between St. Clair and Davenport.
Just two years later, by 1928, the Schomberg, Woodbridge and Lambton lines were abandoned, the latter two replaced by buses. Within ten years, they were joined by the Guelph interurban and city systems, the former Lake Simcoe Line north of Richmond Hill, the Port Credit and most of the Scarborough radials, as well as the Davenport streetcar were all replaced by TTC and Gray Coach buses.
Similar maps created by Fomin on Transit Toronto illustrate the TTC streetcar system in 1945 (3.5 MB) and the streetcar and trolley bus system as of 1965 (4.3 MB), just prior to the opening of the first phase of the Bloor-Danforth Subway.