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Streetcars, Trains, Ships in the same patch of land. Thats transportation!

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Streetcars, Trains, Ships in the same patch of land. Thats transportation!
Posted by Miningman on Saturday, May 19, 2018 12:59 AM

This view looking east. Yardman is flagging traffic as movement is going against traffic. 
Conductor on rear of van is controlling movement with backup brake hose and whistle. 
Victory Mills elevator in background. Canada Steamship Lines lake freighter Renvoyle
TTC 4522 heading east to Bay Street where it will turn north on Bay travelling via 
Davenport Road and Dupont Street to Christie Street (west of Bathurst Street). 
Tuesady, June 14, 1955 Robert J. Sandusky

6280 on Wharf job shoving westward along Queens Quay passing Pier 6 Canada Steamship Lines
and the massive Terminal Warehouse built for perishable food products. 
Red box on tender contains fire hose typical for all yard engines in steam era. 
TTC streetcar has just left the Ferry loop on west side of York Street. 
Roll signs read Christie (destination loop) Dupont (route name). 
This route had been extended south to docks replacing the Bay route March 30, 1954 
following opening of Yonge Subway. Small overhead sign attached to wire (upper right) 
reads: Autos Warning streetcar curve. Note White Rose to right of roof sign on 
Terminal Warehouse. This brand belonged to Canadian Oil Companies Ltd, the last independent
Canadian oil company. It was bought in 1962 by Shell.
Tuesday, June 14, 1955 Robert J. Sandusky 

7020 moving against flow of street traffic westward along Queens Quay approaching York Street. 
First box car is CP 254937. Note Royal York hotel in left background beyond Royal Mail main 
postal facility. Note too all the clean automobiles none of which are disputing the right of way! 
From deck of the S.S.Cayuga Sunday, August 26, 1956 Robert J. Sandusky

The Royal Mail Postal Facility is now the home of the Toronto Maple Leafs. They kept the facade of the building intact  for the new arena. By the way ...Go Golden Knights!...amazing!!

I think the third car ( parked) from the right is the original Batmobile!

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Posted by Firelock76 on Saturday, May 19, 2018 9:45 AM

Talk about co-ordinated transport!

And that third shot's just great!  What a great assortment of "Superman" cars!

And you're right, that third car from the right could very well be the original "Batmobile!" 

Thank God for Kodachrome slide film!  Those shots could have been taken yesterday.

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Posted by Miningman on Saturday, May 19, 2018 2:40 PM

Well they went and took your Kodachrome away, despite the pleas in the song. 

Indeed Firelock, about the pictures, just like yesterday. I'm certainly no digital age fan, I want hard tangible keeper stuff. Now the irony is the Kodachrome images are now for all of us to enjoy digitally and that is the good thing...but the images have to have been made in the first place and having hard actual slides or photos gives it all real world substance. 

I wonder how many digital images stored on a memory somewhere actually survive. The 1000 photos on my iPad are easy enough to share around but they are not as meaningful or permanent as my old photo albums which I can touch. Plus we are all subject to a third party and more regarding even hosting and storing them. If some hacker or government agency through censorship really wanted to wipe me out they could at the push of a button. Of course my house could burn down and I lose all the photos that way as well. 

Those images are still strong in my memory, Queens Quay is still there but it's all touristy now...still have the streetcars though. 

 

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Posted by Firelock76 on Saturday, May 19, 2018 3:55 PM

How many images will survive on a DVD or memory chip?  Ah, there's the rub, no-one really knows.  Only time will tell.

The thing is, those Kodachrome slides if stored properly could last hundreds of years. 

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Posted by Miningman on Saturday, May 19, 2018 5:40 PM

Well they say "everything's in the Cloud now" but I'm not so sure. Also when a person finally bites the dust and there is no password, no access to the devices. Also ever changing technology makes things obsolete real fast and again things could be lost because there is no charger, as is my case with an 'older' flip phone, not compatible computer language and so on. My IT department can't help me, tells me to forget about it. I have ONR pictures on there!

Photos in an album or shoe box do not have these problems. 

You know what else I miss? ...going to the record store and browsing around to see whats new and check out the albums I've missed from the past. Used to be an hour long ritual every Saturday afternoon for a long time and would always manage to blow 20 bucks or so.  Now I do not have a clue about whats going on. Someone with one or two 2 tiny earbuds listening to what sounds like Romper Room music telling me my stereo system is a dinosaur is totally out to lunch. Now you can't even get any CD's! I don't even know how the music industry makes any money any more...

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Posted by Penny Trains on Saturday, May 19, 2018 7:06 PM

Firelock76
that third car from the right could very well be the original "Batmobile!"

1943 serial car:

Alfred drove, Batman changed clothes in the back seat after closing the curtains.

The 1949 serial car:

Either Batman or Robin would drive while the other one changed outfits.  (In a convertible?  Tongue Tied)

Batman in this kinda car just doesn't look right!  Laugh

Trains, trains, wonderful trains.  The more you get, the more you toot!  Big Smile

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Posted by Firelock76 on Sunday, May 20, 2018 11:15 AM

You know, I'll be dipped if I'm going to store any images in something named for a atmospheric phenomenon that's amorphous, etherial, and gassy like a "Cloud!"

No sir!  Anything I want to keep goes into a photo album, a slide box, or the bookshelf!

Mark my words brothers and sisters, and don't ever forget them.  This world's heading for a "Digital Titanic"  one of these days, and it won't be pretty when it happens.  All it can take is a group of Internet "Doctor Frankensteins" who don't know what they're playing with, or do know what they're playing with, and I'm not sure which could be worse.

Yeah, I miss the old-time record stores too, but depending where you live there's still some around.  Takes some looking, that's for sure.  Most Barnes & Nobles I go to have a pretty good music section, but if there's no B&N in your neighborhood I can see how the pickin's can be pretty slim.

PS:  I still have the first record album I ever purchased.  Bought it at Sam Goody's Records in the Garden State Plaza in Paramus NJ in 1970.  I think it was $3 at the time.  "Wagners Greatest Hits."   Ah yes, overtures from Tannhauser, Lohengrin, Rienzi, and a superb symphonic arrangement of Ride Of The Valkyries.

I have to be careful playing the last one though.  I get glassy-eyed and start muttering  "Must invade Poland...must invade Poland..."

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Posted by Miningman on Sunday, May 20, 2018 2:48 PM

My Dad had all that stuff including Wagner. Don't think Wagner was thinking of invading Poland when he wrote it though. It is very stirring. 'What's his name' will be forever linked to it however. 

Think my first record I purchased on my own was the Beatles and my folks were stunned with 'Roll over Beethoven'...I well remember they were quite amused.

Agree 100% on the Frankenstein internet effect. It could even be a fake set up for complete government control. It is too fragile, too easily manipulated, too easy to create divide and conquer, too much backwards tribalism and on and on it goes. I cannot imagine a world without it now, but the danger comes from those who crave power and control at any cost. Individualism and Liberty are their enemies. 

 

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Posted by Atchee on Sunday, May 20, 2018 3:34 PM

When my mother passed away I was finally forced to deal with the 1000's of slides my dad took and boxes of old prints from several generations.  These were stored in the one room in a finished basement that didn't have the ceiling fall in from an all night water leak upstairs.  That doesn't mean the storage cases for some didn't get wet.  Re-masking slides is a time consuming business.

Additionally, not all the slides were stable color-wise and a great deal of fussing with photoshop software is necessary to salvage them.

I'd give just about anything if those were all digital files and it was just a simple matter of copying stuff and distributing to interested family.  Whats involved is scanning batches of 50 at a time then labeling and "fixing" all the pictures.  Then, they get stored in multiple formats.

I do agree that any storage medium you aren't in control of can go the F0T0 BKT way and you can loose everything easily

At this point in time various types of storage that have been around for a while are comparitively cheap and it's easy to make multiple copies of the slides as they get digitized (think hot swapping 1Gb or larger hard drives).  Once they get distributed it should be relatively easy for anyone to replace lost or damaged pictures.  Hard copies - not so much.  I pitch the originals as they get scanned as storage was the issue that got them scanned in the first place.

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Posted by Miningman on Sunday, May 20, 2018 11:49 PM

Have to disagree 100% on 'pitching them'. 

Call Firelock or myself and we will be glad to take them off your hands and solve your storage problems. Better than us rooting through your garbage. 

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Posted by M636C on Monday, May 21, 2018 7:54 AM

This world's heading for a "Digital Titanic"  one of these days, and it won't be pretty when it happens. 

Strange you should say this: today the largest mobile (cell) phone provider in Australia lost voice coverage on their high speed network in every major city today. It was down for four hours, and the really worrying comment is that they don't know what happened. Less than a month ago a fire occurred in a cable pit in a remote farming area. As a result, all emergency calls (our 000, your 911) in the country were down for most of the day. The automatic back up failed to operate. How can the loss of a cable in one remote area knock out vital services  thousands of miles away?

I now use a Nikon D750 and the photos are better than any I ever took with even good Canon film SLR cameras and Kodachrome (when I could still get it - in Australia it was off the market in 2003). I keep copies on backup external hard drives but have used DVDs in the past as well as the hard drives.

Peter

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Posted by daveklepper on Monday, May 21, 2018 10:42 AM

Still using my Leica M3 and with Kodak negative film or Fuji, whatever I can get.  But I do like the ability to correct the scanned results for color and balance.

I love those Toronto system pix.  I got to Toronto too late for the harborside scenes, but after the really last abandonments of original systems in the USA, leaving only Shaker Hieghts, the Boston and Philly subway-based trolley lines plus Red Arrow and Matapan, San Francosco's Market Street Lines, Pittsburgh's two South Hills lines, and New Orleans' St. Charles Avenue, Toronto was the only system that was really a system, not just a skelaton, and mostly traditional streetdar operation with simingly all possible varieties of single-end PCCs, even mu operationi on Bloor-Danforth, the only remaining system that really took more than one day to cover.  It became my favorite North American City.  But now San Francisco is making a comeback.

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Posted by Miningman on Monday, May 21, 2018 4:53 PM

Thanks Dave.

The TTC and its streetcars have come under attack forever and continues on today. Motorists hate them, truckers hate them, cyclists hate them, politicians hate them, city counsellors are always railing against them, economists hate them, radio personalities hate them ....despite all this they soldier on, undaunted. The riding public certainly appreciates them. I cannot imagine the level of sanity, cleanliness, congestion removal, neighbourhood pride, convenience and reliability they have brought and contributed over the years.

It is an inmeasurable statistic that everyone and their dog realizes. That is why they persevere and the system remains intact. 

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Posted by Firelock76 on Monday, May 21, 2018 7:33 PM

Jeez, if all those groups hate those streetcars then the TTC must be doing something right! 

As the late Howard Cosell once said, "What is popular isn't always right, and what's right isn't always popular!"

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Posted by MidlandMike on Tuesday, May 22, 2018 4:35 PM

Isn't the TTC a publicly owned system?  How can all politicians, or even a majority, be against their trolley which they control?

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Posted by Miningman on Tuesday, May 22, 2018 4:56 PM

The politicians never have the fortitude to see it through...the alternatives are ridiculous, so they just complain and threaten. No one person is a dictator...it's a miracle anything gets done. 

New Subway vs. New Streetcar Lines have been legendary battles. 

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Posted by SD70Dude on Wednesday, May 23, 2018 10:37 PM

At least they are buying new streetcars again.

Greetings from Alberta

-an Articulate Malcontent

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Posted by Miningman on Thursday, May 24, 2018 1:05 AM

Took the long running and still very much going and super busy Queen St car, known simply as the Queen car, everyday. I lived at the bottom of Queen near Roncesvalles and would get off at University Ave. and go North to the University of Toronto, St. Michaels College by subway. The Queen car stopped right at the entrance to it.  At that stop, also right there, was the TD Bank. So that is where I did my banking and remained with the TD all my life. 

Once in while some customer service thingie, a survey, a rep, a call, or online would ask me why I chose TD bank and I would state every time that this was where the Queen car transferred me to the subway line. 

I don't think they care about such things any longer, subways and streetcars mean nothing to the banks and their on line nonsense. 

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Posted by daveklepper on Thursday, May 24, 2018 10:13 AM

How do you like the new low-floor articulated cars?  Compared to the PCCs. the CLRAs, and the ALRAs?

But please don't tell me you'd rather go back to the Peter Witts!

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Posted by Miningman on Thursday, May 24, 2018 5:53 PM

Dave I don't reside in Toronto any longer and have not visited in more than 10 years, but there are Forum members who reside in Toronto, 54light15 being one. Perhaps he could answer your question. 

I'm sure they are just fine and dandy. 

By the way...you can still ride Peter Witts AND PCC's in Toronto! They are for nostalgia, pride and tourists. Selected routes, including the Queens Quay as in the photos. The Peter Witts go on a more system wide tour. 

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Posted by Miningman on Saturday, February 9, 2019 12:44 PM

Some aerial views of the area, one 1960 one '66.

Check out all that Canadian Pacific passenger equipment at Union Station. A sea of maroon. The great axe is only months away and many many trains discontinued never to be seen again. 

Of great importance is the fact that ALL this industry is now gone. The area is now a solid wall several layers deep of high rise condos. 

I don't know about you but that scares me socially, economically and you name it.

Aerial view looking north at Lake Shore Blvd. E. and York Street. CPR Coach Yard in middle of this 1960 scene. 
Union Station and Royal York Hotel beyond. Dark building at left is TTR Central Heating Plant. Chuckman's Photos 

Aerial view of Queen's Wharf with four freighters at dock plus another (blue) at an Ashbridge's Bay pier. 1966
Note first tower of Toronto-Dominion still under construction. This tower at 66 Wellington Street West is 56 floors.
It officially opened (unfinished) July 1, 1967 Centennial Day. Chuckman's Photos

NDG
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Posted by NDG on Sunday, February 10, 2019 3:37 PM
FYI.
 
 
These old views are very interesting, and  ( Too? ) much could be written about them.
 
Mr. M M showed us some of these images before and each has a story.
 
CN Toronto Belt Line serviced the TTC Subway Shops @ Davisville. 
 
Suggest tracks entering building would be different Gauge.
 
 
 
Until they came off, Mount Pleasant cars were an alternate route to the Subway from Eglington, and the Coal Towers a Fixture to be admired as one passed. Looking North.
 
 

http://www.trainweb.org/oldtimetrains/shortlines/toronto_belt_line.htm

 
 
A Classic TO View.
 
 
Ditto.
 
Heading East w Fs.  The Paint on Fs would be Gold and Green.
 
 
Note BA Sign behind pole. Another Fallen Flag.
 
 
Opening Frames of this NFB Film shows one of these engines Heading a double-header. Film Reversed. CN 4100s have Air and Water Pump, Left Side.
 
 
 
CPR's first Diesel in TO was CP 7020, and is preserved.
 
Note Lidgerwood Winch, to left.
 
 
 
Lake Ontario, Bottom.
 
 Thank You.
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Posted by Miningman on Wednesday, February 13, 2019 8:42 PM

To the left is the incredible solid wall several layers deep of the 'view' of the waterfront from the rest of the city. 

This similar view to the left (south) shows the double track flyunder, through tracks and a small part of the 
vast wall of high rise condominium buildings that blanket the waterfront. New Front St. footbridge. 7/11/2018

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Posted by SD70Dude on Wednesday, February 13, 2019 11:30 PM

NDG
FYI.
 
These old views are very interesting, and  ( Too? ) much could be written about them.
 
Mr. M M showed us some of these images before and each has a story.
 
CN Toronto Belt Line serviced the TTC Subway Shops @ Davisville. 
 
Suggest tracks entering building would be different Gauge.
 
 
Until they came off, Mount Pleasant cars were an alternate route to the Subway from Eglington, and the Coal Towers a Fixture to be admired as one passed. Looking North.
 

http://www.trainweb.org/oldtimetrains/shortlines/toronto_belt_line.htm

A Classic TO View.
 
 
Ditto.
 
Heading East w Fs.  The Paint on Fs would be Gold and Green.
 
 
Note BA Sign behind pole. Another Fallen Flag.
 
 
Opening Frames of this NFB Film shows one of these engines Heading a double-header. Film Reversed. CN 4100s have Air and Water Pump, Left Side.
 
 
CPR's first Diesel in TO was CP 7020, and is preserved.
 
Note Lidgerwood Winch, to left.
 
 
 
Lake Ontario, Bottom.
 
 Thank You.

Great stuff!

I never knew that CN's F3's came with full vestibules. 

Can't make out the numbers, but there's something familiar about that A unit...

Greetings from Alberta

-an Articulate Malcontent

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Posted by rcdrye on Thursday, February 14, 2019 6:38 AM

SD70Dude
I never knew that CN's F3's came with full vestibules.

Diaphragms (the foldy things on the end between the units) were common enough on early F- and E-units. Most got removed as they wore out.  They weren't worth the trouble for the relatively few trips made to trailing units that couldn't be made at a stop.  Seaboard's E4 nose door setup to allow crew to move between the engines and the rest of the train weren't repeated for the same reason.

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