Invisible Transit

By Joe Donnelly
August 14th, 2006.
The first “Red Line” streetcar rolled into Inglewood on freshly-laid tracks on July 20, 1909—a Tuesday. The line was doubled to 12th Street to accommodate visitors to St. George’s Island, then narrowed to a single track for the last four blocks on 9th Avenue, ending with a lefthand loop at 15th Street, convenient for workers at the brewery and the Cushing Brothers planing mill.

Each streetcar had 36 seats. A motorman operated the car from the front, while a conductor at the rear took fares from entering passengers. Adult tickets were 18 for a dollar; for children under 14 it was 8 tickets for a quarter. The adult cash fare was a dime.

This first trolley system ran from 15th Street East to 14th Street West, and from Hillhurst in the north to Mission in the south. There were 12 cars operating originally, over 16 miles of track. 15-minute service was advertised. Whether streetcars should run on Sunday was much discussed, particularly by Reverend Kerby of the Calgary Central Methodist church. A plebiscite settled the matter strongly in favour of Sunday streetcars, thus increasing the runs to Inglewood and the dances at St. George’s Island Park.

The trolley streetcars were so popular that at the end of 1910 the Calgary Municipal Railway had carried more than 4,800,000 passengers, an extraordinary number for such a small town. By 1911 there were 48 streetcars in operation. By 1912 the lines had been extended to Ogden, Bowness, Tuxedo Park, Manchester, Killarney, and Riverside. In 1914 each streetcar was reduced to a one-man operation, a motor-conductor.

The Ogden line was significant for both Inglewood and Ramsay. The 1909 track along 12th Street SW was extended through Victoria Park and over the Macdonald Bridge.  The single line ran along 8th Street to 21st Avenue, then 11th Street to 26th Avenue, thus providing transportation for Burns workers.  From there the line dipped south to 82nd Avenue and the Ogden loop.

By 1921 the Ogden route had brought further extensions to streetcar service in Inglewood. The tracks were doubled all the way to the end of 9th Avenue near Colonel Walker’s home. This required the building of Inglewood’s first subway under the CPR’s Edmonton tracks. A single-line spur at 16th Street just beyond the underpass ran south to connect with the Ogden line at 26th Avenue, following what is now the Blackfoot Trail bridge over the Alyth yards.  This served as the inbound route for Ogden streetcars. June Parker recalls how the Ogden students hated being identified as East Calgarians at Crescent Heights High School because of the streetcar they rode to school.

In 1926 the 9th Avenue tracks were cut back to the Colonel Walker school on 17th Street and ran south (on the open prairie behind No. 8 firehall) to a loop at 30th Avenue. In the meantime, Ramsay’s tracks were doubled along 8th Street with a single-line return along 19th Avenue.

Even with maps it is impossible to visualize these streetcar lines from such numerical descriptions and it’s now physically impossible to retrace the routes over the present lie of the land—by car, on foot, or by bike. The place has been altered too much. The tracks were removed piecemeal between 1950 and 1967. The trolley wires were down before that. Two abandoned streetcars marked the Inglewood landscape for some time—car no. 14 on the property where the swimming pool now sits (no. 14 was refurbished and now operates on the Heritage Park tracks) and an unnumbered streetcar which served until recently as a decaying shed in the lot across from Crown Surplus.

Why after 40 years of service the streetcar disappeared so completely is another story, part of a larger North American story. Whether the current worldwide revival of this form of urban transit comes to Inglewood and Ramsay is an even further story.

The last “Red Line” (Route 1) streetcar  run in Inglewood was on December 7, 1949.