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After covering the history of the London Street Rail Company in the premiere edition of our latest series, Once Upon a Tram is back this week with look at the 65-year history of the British Columbia Electric Railway (BCER), and its extensive streetcar and interurban networks which operated in Victoria and Vancouver from 1897 to 1961. With both cities now grappling with the possibilities of either rebuilding or expanding some form of LRT network to their respective urban centres, SkyriseCities is pleased to take a journey into the public transit past of British Columbia's two largest cities.
Starting in the capital, Victoria's streetcar network began operations on February 22, 1890, when the first set of tracks were laid downtown, connecting the wharf to nearby Yates, Douglas, and Government Streets. Completed by the local National Electric Tramway and Lighting Company Limited, Victoria's first streetcar network comprised just four wooden cars, which carried passengers across nine kilometres of track through the centre of the city. The opening of the line drew a large crowd of spectators, with the Colonist reporting that the event had been graced by the presence of both Lieutenant Governor Hugh Nelson and Premier John Robson. Only the third such electric streetcar service to open in Canada at the time, the event marked a technological milestone for the young nation.
Following the collapse of the National Electric Tramway and Lighting Company Limited, along with the contemporaneous failure of the Vancouver Electric Railway and Light Company Limited as well as the Westminster and Vancouver Tramway Company in 1895, all three companies were brought together within the Consolidated Railway and Light Company, which itself went into receivership only two years later. The entire enterprise was then taken under control of the British Columbia Electric Railway company, which successfully owned, operated, and expanded the aforementioned networks until 1961. Seen above, the Victoria streetcar network expanded significantly during the early twentieth century, with nearly a dozen routes carrying passengers to every corner of the city and beyond, going deep into the then suburban residential areas outside the city centre.
Following the Second World War, the Victoria streetcar network — and more specifically, its fleet of aging, mostly wooden, turn-of-the-century cars — was falling into disrepair. Combined with the increasing popularity of the automobile, the prohibitive cost of upgrading the entire fleet was seen as impractical, so the City of Victoria opted instead to begin a trial run with trolley buses borrowed from nearby Seattle. Despite showing promise, the BCER decided to convert to gasoline-powered buses, with service beginning in 1948, while neighbouring Vancouver opted instead to adapt their network completely to trolley buses, the modern variants of which remain active in that city to this day.
Moving onto the mainland, Vancouver's own streetcar network, also owned and operated by the BCER, mirrors the experience of nearby Victoria. Seen in the 1936 map below, Vancouver's streetcar and interurban rail network was every bit as extensive as Victoria's and then some, carrying travellers within the city along dozens of kilometres of local tracks, while the supporting interurban lines reached outward to nearly every suburb and small town outside of Vancouver and helped bring commuters in and out of the city.
Into the 1920s, the Vancouver streetcar network continued to expand as the city grew outwards. As ridership increased, the popular local service began a publication called The Buzzer, which remains in circulation today, predating the various transit-based newspapers that have since become commonplace around the globe. Along with the rest of the province, Vancouver switched from left- to right-hand drive in 1922, a change which affected the entire network from that point on until the end of streetcar service on April 24, 1955. Transit aficionados will note that Vancouver used the same PCC streetcars as Toronto during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.
By the late 1940s and into the 50s, the Vancouver branch of the BCER began to gradually convert the city's numerous streetcar routes to electric trolley buses. From 1947 to the end of service in 1955, Vancouver began what was then marketed as the "Rails-to-Rubber" transition during which the entire system was converted to trolley buses, a change which has endured in various iterations across the city to this day. In 1961, the Provincial Government took over the entire BCER system, as part of its takeover of BC Electric. The associated interurban network, already greatly diminished by then thanks to the popularity of the automobile and freeway, became known as the Southern Railway of British Columbia in 1989, operating solely as a short line freight network. Today, the entire network is under the control of TransLink, a provincial body responsible for all public transportation in British Columbia, which was created in 1998.
Today, as Vancouver has experienced a decades-long period of explosive growth and urban densification, the need for public transit, including buses, the SkyTrain, and ongoing LRT projects, has never been greater. From January to March, 2010, as part of a test-run and pilot project for the possible return of streetcars to Metro Vancouver, the Vancouver Downtown Historic Railway ran a mixture of restored BCER cars and two modern Bombardier-built trams on loan from Brussels along a 1.8-kilometre track between Granville Island and Main Street SkyTrain Station. While reviews were mixed, ridership was encouraging, with 500,000 passengers engaging with the free service over the duration of its short three-month run. While it is yet to be determined just what form a restored streetcar network would take in Vancouver today, the history of public transit in the city can serve as a useful example for city planners and transit advocates about the ways in which such a system could be implemented in the near future.
Having now looked at the past of both the Victoria and Vancouver streetcar networks, SkyriseCities invites the reader to take a look at an excellent collection of archival film footage of both systems in action. Captured in 1907 by American moving picture pioneer William H. Harbeck, who was hired by the Canadian Pacific Railway's Department of Colonisation to create a series of promotional featurettes on the urban vibrancy of British Columbia, these early films were shot from the front of a moving streetcar and offer a rare glimpse of daily life in Victoria and Vancouver at the outset of the twentieth century. As an interesting aside, Harbeck perished five years later while onboard the RMS Titanic on special assignment to capture the historic docking of the ship once it reached New York. His body was later found clutching his mistress' purse, and the fallout of his untimely scandal-plagued death nearly resulted in the loss of ownership of his life's work. His widow was able to obtain over 100,000 feet of moving picture film shot by her late husband from his former business partner for the then princely sum of $50,000. If not for Mrs. Harbeck's efforts, we may never have had the pleasure of watching the following features:
Victoria, 1907, and, Vancouver, 1907, by William H. Harbeck
Restored by Library and Archives Canada, the above video includes two films edited into one. The first three minutes were shot onboard a moving streetcar in Victoria, followed by another two minuets of boating around in the Victoria Harbour and travelling the countryside of Vancouver Island, followed by the last five minutes which all take place in downtown Vancouver, once more from the vantage point of a moving streetcar. Capturing the length of Government Street through downtown Victoria, the film makes a stop at the wharf, the site of the then-under-construction Empress Hotel and the British Columbia Parliament Buildings, which were constructed ten years prior by local architect Francis Rattenbury. After some interesting footage of the Harbour and the surrounding countryside, the film moves to the streets of Vancouver. The Vancouver footage follows a few different routes, with street scenes from Granville Street, a glimpse of the old Waterfront CPR Station, trips along West Hastings Street, Carrall Street, West Cordova Street, and Canbie Street, along with views of Robson Street, before finally ending up on Davie Street, which was then the site of stately, newly built homes. Relevant to the context of a recent Cityscape feature on SkyriseCities, several of the homes seen at the end of the film are representative of the heyday of Vancouver's West Coast Arts and Crafts Movement and built heritage.
SkyriseCities will return soon with a new edition of Once Upon a Tram, which will take an in-depth look at the transit legacy of a city near you.
Feel free to join the conversation in the comments section below. Got an idea for our new series? Let us know!
