Feature Photo

We hope it’s not too early for a little bit of Christmas cheer. Back in the 1950s, the TTC celebrated the season by repainting (NOT, we emphasize, using vinyl wrap) a number of TTC buses and even a trolley bus in festive paint schemes and running them throughout the city. On December 5, 1956, the TTC posed a repainted GM “Old Look” at a bus loop at the corner of Bathurst and Davenport for a publicity shot. Pete Coulman was kind enough to provide us with a scan of this old postcard, and a history of the TTC’s festive Christmas buses can be found here.

This is one of the classic and current photographs we’ve added to the Transit Toronto web site as part of our growing collection of bus route histories. Jeffrey Kay and Peter Coulman, not to mention uber-mapmaker John Calnan, have been working away, cobbling together a detailed chronology of the development of the TTC’s bus route network from 1921 to today. At present, we have over 200 histories on site, and consider ourselves to be over two-thirds done. Stay tuned as more histories are added in the coming weeks.