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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Tracking Winnipeg's history
Heritage group to get piece of streetcar rail
Steven Stothers says his group would be happy to get a few feet of rail with cobblestones. (BORIS MINKEVICH / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS) Photo Store
Heritage advocates may want a streetcar museum but for now, they are happy getting some rails they used to run on.
A portion of the rails the city's streetcars ran on decades ago is being pulled up for street reconstruction at Broadway and Osborne Street and given to Winnipeg Streetcar 356, with hopes someday it can be put into a museum devoted to streetcars. The group is currently restoring a streetcar.
Steven Stothers, co-chairman of the group's restoration committee, said they hope not only will they end up with a few metres of steel rail, which has been hidden under pavement for more than half a century, but also with the cobblestones that held the rails in place.
"We're not sure how much we will get -- hopefully at least a couple of five-foot sections," Stothers said on Wednesday.
"We would need 80 feet of rail to go under the streetcar, but if we can get two five-foot sections for now, that would be great."
Before 1955, Winnipeg Transit and earlier private companies ran streetcars on rail through the city as well as electric trolley buses. Electric streetcars began operating in the city in the late 1800s.
After the last streetcar was taken out of service in 1955, rails across the city were either torn out or covered with asphalt as streets were widened. Photographs of streetcars running through the city can be found at winnipegstreetcar.com .
Darren Burmey, the city's bridge projects engineer, said all the streetcar rail uncovered during last year's street renewal on the east side of Osborne Street between Broadway and the Osborne Street Bridge was covered with geo-fabric and then paved over because it was too deep to cause any street-repair problems.
But Burmey said a portion of the rail on the west side of the street was higher, so it had to be taken out before the road-repair work could be done.
"Some of the rails were visible in the road even before we did any work," he said.
Burmey said the cobblestone and switches to allow the streetcar to change tracks as it turned the corner were also removed.
"If it is salvageable, we do make the effort to contact the appropriate heritage people," he said.
Stothers said his group will store the rails, hoping they will someday be in a museum.
kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 10, 2012 A2
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