When Vancouver could have been like Edmonton and Calgary
When Vancouver dismantled its interurban railway network in the 1950s, it wasn’t long until local officials and the provincial government began to discuss options to recreate it in the form of a rapid transit.
In the 1970s, constant traffic problems and the oil crisis spurred the provincial government to start serious proposals for what would become the region’s rail system.
The above map isn’t too dissimilar to what we have today (Hastings and North Shore do not have rail as of today), but the government’s idea was to quickly revive the old BC Electric Railway by strong-arming it into existence.
And how do you force a railway to exist? By of course buying a Siemens vehicle from what was then West Germany to demonstrate the proposal along the Central Park BCER line (which is now the Expo Line).
However, in 1976, a succeeding government who didn’t like the purchase but had to receive it anyway opted to keep the train in storage. It languished in a rail yard in New Westminster until 1987 when it sold it to a group in Edmonton for a loonie. At some point in the last decade, it was returned to its native Germany where it now resides in a museum.
Interestingly, the government also had purchased back two former-BCER interurban vehicles from owners in Washington state. These two vehicles are still in Metro Vancouver with one residing in Steveston and the other in Cloverdale.
It wasn’t the first time LRT was proposed nor the last. Almost every planned LRT implementation in Metro Vancouver has turned into some sort of light metro. There is this desire to replicate the Edmonton LRT or Calgary C-Train for some reason.
Perhaps when the City of Vancouver finally implements its street car network we’ll finally have such trains in use in the region once again?
This originally appeared on cohost.org/VancouverTransit but has been moved here due to the site’s shutdown.
