Environmentally friendly trams return to Vancouver in 2010
Was it 2009, or 1959? For a moment there it was hard to tell, as we watched an excavator erase what remained of a once-bustling Vancouver streetcar line. A half-century back, the same scene was unspooling all over the city, as diesel buses replaced an extensive network of trams, tracks and overhead wires in the name of, ah, progress.
But this present-day deconstruction project, near the entrance to Granville Island, will have a happier ending. Turns out the City of Vancouver is working with Canadian tram-builder Bombardier to bring streetcars back to the city—well, at least a tiny piece of it—for the 60 days of the 2010 Winter Games. The company supplies cool "low-floor" electrified trains to Euro-cities such as Milan and Marseille and, come next year, will run a couple of the new trams on a rebuilt 1.8-km (1.12-m) line between Granville Island and the new Canada Line Olympic Village SkyTrain rapid-transit line station.
Which is where the digger comes in. Until recently, the right-of-way in question was a decrepit and crumbling Canadian Pacific Railway branch line; in recent years, the Downtown Historic Railway ran a restored streetcar over the tracks for summer visitors. Vancouver is kicking in $8.5 million to rebuild it for Bombardier's Uber-Trams, then will hand it back to the historians after the athletes head home.
The line has been a whisper of what once was—and come next year, with newly up-to-snuff railbed, track and stations, it will prove itself a glimpse of what, inevitably, the city will be again.
Source: Canadian Tourism Commission
Was it 2009, or 1959? For a moment there it was hard to tell, as we watched an excavator erase what remained of a once-bustling Vancouver streetcar line. A half-century back, the same scene was unspooling all over the city, as diesel buses replaced an extensive network of trams, tracks and overhead wires in the name of, ah, progress.
But this present-day deconstruction project, near the entrance to Granville Island, will have a happier ending. Turns out the City of Vancouver is working with Canadian tram-builder Bombardier to bring streetcars back to the city—well, at least a tiny piece of it—for the 60 days of the 2010 Winter Games. The company supplies cool "low-floor" electrified trains to Euro-cities such as Milan and Marseille and, come next year, will run a couple of the new trams on a rebuilt 1.8-km (1.12-m) line between Granville Island and the new Canada Line Olympic Village SkyTrain rapid-transit line station.
Which is where the digger comes in. Until recently, the right-of-way in question was a decrepit and crumbling Canadian Pacific Railway branch line; in recent years, the Downtown Historic Railway ran a restored streetcar over the tracks for summer visitors. Vancouver is kicking in $8.5 million to rebuild it for Bombardier's Uber-Trams, then will hand it back to the historians after the athletes head home.
The line has been a whisper of what once was—and come next year, with newly up-to-snuff railbed, track and stations, it will prove itself a glimpse of what, inevitably, the city will be again.
Source: Canadian Tourism Commission
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