Genesis Toronto grew extensively during the 1960s and 1970s, and like many cities in North America, most of this growth was in the
suburbs. In order to move workers to and from the business and industrial areas in the city centre, an
extensive series of expressways was planned, and made its way into the city's Official Plan in 1966. As work on the new highways started, a wave of public protest followed as many houses, and in some cases entire neighbourhoods, were bulldozed to make way. The work became increasingly opposed in Toronto, especially after the cause was taken up by famous urban commentator,
Jane Jacobs. In 1971
Bill Davis won the
Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario leadership contest, replacing long-serving
John Robarts as the official party leader and
Premier of Ontario. Shortly after taking power, on 3 June Davis announced that he was cancelling provincial support for the highly controversial
Spadina Expressway in Toronto, rising in the legislature and stating that "Cities were built for people and not cars. If we are building a transportation system to serve the automobile, the Spadina Expressway would be a good place to start. But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expressway is a good place to stop." The TTC suggested that all of the high-density routes suitable for subways were already being served. The other vehicles in use with the TTC, buses and streetcars, would not be able to provide rapid transit unless they were given a separate right-of-way. This expense is easy to justify in the case of a subway with its large passenger capacity, but for a system like a bus the capital costs overwhelm the passenger numbers these systems could carry. What was needed was a new system that reduced the capital costs to be able to efficiently serve low-density routes in the suburbs, a system with flexible sizing somewhere between a small subway and large streetcar, an "intermediate" sized system.
ICTS (since sold to
Detroit People Mover), has a driver
SkyTrain Work on an Intermediate Capacity Transit System (ICTS) had already started in 1970. Several consulting firms were asked to provide separate feasibility reports with outlines of a basic system. At the time, new urban transit systems were a field of active research across North America due to U.S. federal funding under the
Urban Mass Transportation Administration's (UMTA) plans to roll out new systems in cities across the country. UMTA was convinced that urban rail systems would only be able to compete with cars if they had more car-like capabilities, and they were primarily interested in the
personal rapid transit (PRT) concept of automated car-like cabs that would pick up and drop off passengers as individual units and then link up into longer trains for travel at high speed between stations. A number of companies in the U.S. were in the process of developing systems for UMTA, and many of these companies submitted a proposal for the ICTS project. It was with the formation of the new
Ministry of Transportation and Communications in May 1972 that serious development of the ICTS started. On 22 November the new policy was announced. With only Hawker Siddeley and Krauss-Maffei remaining, the 1 May 1973 announcement that the Krauss-Maffei design had won the contest was unsurprising. In November 1974 Krauss-Maffei announced that it was forced to withdraw from the project. The West German government had been funding development of several maglev systems based on different technologies, and decided at that time that Krauss-Maffei's system was less interesting than ones from
Thyssen-Henschel and
Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm. There were also technical problems; in testing, the complex systems needed to switch trains on the magnetic tracks froze up, and would require a re-design.
UTDC On 14 April 1975, the Ministry of Transportation arranged financing for Phase I and II studies to develop a new system to replace the maglev. In June 1975 the Ontario Transportation Development Corporation (OTDC) announced that it had arranged a consortium to continue the development of the ICTS, changing its name to "Urban Transportation Development Corporation" to avoid any "provinciality" during its efforts to market what would now be an entirely local design to other cities. The consortium consisted of
SPAR Aerospace for the
linear induction motor, Standard Elektrik Lorenz's "SelTrac IS" system for the automatic control system,
Dofasco for an articulated
bogie system,
Alcan for the design of the car bodies and a set of prototypes, and
Canadair for assembly and production. A Transit Development Centre for UTDC was built on a site in Millhaven, outside of Kingston, Ontario. Kingston had been home to the
Canadian Locomotive Company that closed its doors in 1969, and the city lobbied hard for the new company to locate there. It was officially opened on 29 September 1978 by
James Snow, the Minister of Transportation and Communications. The site included a oval test track that included at-grade, elevated and ramped sections, switches, and the automatic control centre. Phase III of the ICTS program ended on 31 January 1980 when testing on the prototype was completed at the Millhaven site; by this point the government had invested about $57.2 million, of a total $63 million spent on the product by the government and its industrial partners. Looking for a site in Ontario to serve as a test bed for the ICTS, the government focused on an extension of the eastern end of TTC's
Bloor–Danforth line. The TTC had already started building a streetcar line that would extend from the end of the subway at
Kennedy station to the
Scarborough City Centre, a low-density route passing through industrial land. The TTC was not interested in changing to the ICTS for this route, until the Ontario government, which provided about 80% of the capital costs, stepped in and demanded the ICTS be used. A smaller system in
Hamilton, Ontario was also considered, and there was a brief study for a similar system in
Ottawa, Ontario. With three customers lined up, a manufacturing plant was added to the Millhaven site, VentureTrans Manufacturing, which opened in 1982. Having won the contracts in Canada and USA, UTDC attempted to market the ICTS technology in Europe and Asia. One "near-miss" was in London, where UTDC succeeded in persuading the client, the
London Docklands Development Corporation, to purchase a driverless elevated system for its
Docklands Light Railway. However, due to funding constraints, a cheaper system requiring an on-board attendant was implemented. In 1982 UTDC also entered a design to offer rail service to the suburbs east of Toronto, a system known as
GO ALRT. ALRT was based on the ICTS technology, but used a longer car about the size of a conventional railway passenger car, and replaced the third rail power with an overhead
pantograph. Given the larger sized cars that made mechanical placements easier, conventional motors replaced the linear motor in order to reduce capital costs (the linear motor requires an aluminum "fourth rail" for the entire line). However, due to changes in the laws governing the operation of GO trains on the freight railways they ran on, GO was able to improve its schedules without having to build any new infrastructure. ALRT was cancelled in 1985 in favour of conventional heavy rail technology. UTDC later played an important part in this build-out in spite of these changes, and GO eventually built its own twin-track line to
Oshawa. Construction of the exclusive guideway had already begun in the early 1980s for GO ALRT, which was then modified shortly after to allow for conventional GO Train service. Work on the exclusive track from Pickering to Whitby was completed in 1988, followed by an extension to Oshawa in 1995 with limited service, which was shortly after pushed back up to all day two-way service, allowing for further expansion of Lakeshore East GO train service. Construction of the Toronto and Vancouver systems proceeded apace, with the
Scarborough RT opening for service on 22 March 1985, followed by the Vancouver
SkyTrain on 11 December 1985, where passenger service on what is today's
Expo Line started in January 1986. The systems suffered from serious teething problems; snow froze to the
third rail which required the Scarborough RT system to be fitted with protective covers. The braking system was too powerful and caused the wheels to rub flat in spots, which led to noisy running, the opposite of the design goal. Bugs in the automatic control software led to a number of problems with doors that would not open, "phantom cars" that would appear mid-line and cause the collision avoidance systems to turn on and freeze trains in place in spite of having a driver. A host of other problems seriously delayed scheduled operations. In Toronto, the Scarborough RT became a subject of ridicule, often closing in heavy snows. Most of the problems with the Toronto and Vancouver systems were worked out by the time the
Detroit People Mover opened in July 1987. In the early 1980s, the UTDC was involved in the planning of a new light railway in the northwest
New Territories,
Hong Kong. The corporation was engaged under a bid by
Kowloon Wharf to build and operate the system. After Kowloon Wharf pulled out of the project in 1983, citing concerns over the slow pace of development in
Tuen Mun New Town, UTDC was among several companies that expressed interest in building the railway, but not in operating it. The
Light Rail Transit was eventually built by the
Kowloon-Canton Railway Corporation and opened in 1988.
Can-Car Rail L2 streetcar operating for the
Toronto Transit Commission Bi-level coach in
Toronto Starting in 1972, the TTC contracted
Hawker Siddeley Canada to design a new streetcar known as the "Municipal Surface Car". However, the Government of Ontario had formed the OTDC in the early 1970s, and provided the TTC 75% of its capital funding. The government then demanded that the TTC turn to OTDC for new vehicles. In August 1973 the TTC placed an order with the OTDC for 200 new
Canadian Light Rail Vehicles (CLRV). The design was purchased from the Swiss company
Schweizerische Industrie Gesellschaft (SIG). SIG was contracted to build the first 10 before turning over construction to OTDC, subcontracted at Hawker Siddeley's CC&F factory in Thunder Bay. The prototype run was cut to six, in order to allow four to be converted into an articulated design, the
Articulated Light Rail Vehicle (ALRV). UTDC unveiled the ALRV at a 18–19 June 1982 open house at its Transit Development Centre, which over 10,000 people attended. In March 1983 Hawker Siddeley Canada sold a portion of its CC&F factory in Thunder Bay to the UTDC, creating the jointly owned
Can-Car Rail. Hawker Siddeley had already developed a number of rail vehicles, and with its partnership with UTDC these became the favoured products for a number of contracts in Ontario. In addition to the ICTS, UTDC now had a product portfolio that spanned everything from streetcars to subways to traditional heavy rail passenger cars and hoppers.
Continued successes In December 1983 the TTC announced that it was buying 126 subway cars from UTDC, and followed this in February 1984 with an order for 52 ALRVs. The subway cars were built at Can-Car, but after the first ten ALRVs, streetcar production moved to the Millhaven plants which were winding down their ICTS production. A further run of a modified double-ended ALRVs followed for the Santa Clara County Transportation Agency (now the
Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority), and then a run of 58 subway cars for the
Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority in
Boston. These were the first of many such orders, and hundreds of subway cars were delivered to various U.S. transport services over the next two decades. Since the early 1970s, Hawker Siddeley had been designing a new two-level railcar for
GO Transit, which they started delivering in 1976 as the
BiLevel. GO continued placing additional orders, eventually buying 470 for their service in southern Ontario, where the BiLevel is widely associated with GO. When downsizing hit GO in the early 1990s, a number of these coaches were leased out to various operators in Canada and the US. They were received to rave reviews, and quickly generated orders from operators across North America. Several hundred additional BiLevel cars were built, and over 700 remain in service. UTDC's Can-Car also produced a number of other products for sales to the
Canadian Forces, the medium-sized
M35 2-1/2 ton cargo truck and the larger
Steyr Percheron.
Sale to Lavalin intercity train developed for
Via Rail As early as 1981 the Government of Ontario had considered selling UTDC to the private sector. The government's concern was that without a manufacturing business, UTDC would find it difficult to make enough income to justify its Kingston operations. If the company did start a manufacturing side, it would be inappropriate for the company to remain government owned. Before this was completed, the company went bankrupt.
Sale to Bombardier Transportation in
Kuala Lumpur uses Bombardier's second-generation ART technology As part of the proceedings, UTDC was returned to the
Government of Ontario, which quickly sold it to
Bombardier in February 1992. Bombardier Transportation had in late 1991 negotiated a $17 million subsidy from the Ontario government for the purchase. SNC purchased the engineering portions of the company and became SNC-Lavalin, while most other business were sold to other firms. At that time, UTDC Inc. was a manufacturer of mass transit vehicles with 860 workers in
Thunder Bay and
Kingston, Ontario, creating a yearly turnover of .US$250 million. Bombardier received a US$17 million subsidy in return for commitments to maintain employment and investments of up to US$30 million in plant and equipment. Bombardier quickly re-branded the UTDC products under its growing
Bombardier Transportation marque, which started in 1970 with its purchase of
Rotax, which made engines used in Bombardier's
snowmobiles as well as tramcars. Now in the train business, in 1975 it added the
Montreal Locomotive Works and its
LRC high-speed train design. Although the LRC was never the success Bombardier hoped, the company continued to buy other rail companies in North America and Europe, dramatically expanding its divisions until, with its purchase of
ADtranz in 2001, the largest supplier of rail equipment in the world at the time. light rail vehicle built for the
Ion rapid transit network in the
Kitchener-Waterloo region Bombardier was much more aggressive in marketing the UTDC product line than either the government or Lavalin had been, especially the ICTS. Bombardier re-designed the cars, expanding the passenger capacity and updating their look, re-introducing the product as the
Bombardier Advanced Rapid Transit (ART). ART won the contest for the
AirTrain JFK project, and an improved design introducing
articulating sections between adjacent cars (replacing the coupling and doors of the older (retroactively named) Mark I design) have won several new contests, including the
Millennium Line extension of the Vancouver SkyTrain network. ART technology has also been exported outside North America, and is in use on the
Kelana Jaya Line in
Kuala Lumpur, the
Airport Express in
Beijing (in four-car trains), and on the
EverLine outside of
Seoul. The design has since evolved into the third-generation
Bombardier Innovia Metro design and marketed as part of Bombardier's Innovia family of automated transportation products. Vancouver continues to be the largest operator of the ICTS system, with nearly of operational Innovia Metro trackage on two of its SkyTrain lines since the
Evergreen Extension began service in 2016. Its entire fleet of Mk I and Mk II trains remain in service and have been supplemented by newly built Mk III trains. Bombardier also continues to win sales with its other light rail vehicles, including a major expansion of its globally based
Bombardier Flexity platform to the North American
streetcar and
light rail markets. In 2009, the TTC selected a
derivative of the
Bombardier Flexity Outlook design to replace its legacy fleet and make its entire streetcar network wheelchair-accessible, and in 2010
Metrolinx commissioned a large order of
Bombardier Flexity Freedom LRVs for newly constructed light rail lines in the
Greater Toronto Area. Although manufacturing of both the TTC and Metrolinx orders was intended to be completed entirely at the CC&F plants, recurrent delays and other technical problems have led to Bombardier opening a second production line at the former CLC site in Kingston. ==UTDC products==