What TTC routes are your favorite and why?

[Orion VI]

Mine is obviously 14 Glencairn. I just saw 1001 go by on it. It's because I live on Glencairn Ave. and see the 14 go by everyday, and it's been my dream to drive a 14 since i was little. Mount Dennis, here I come!

[Kelvin3157]

... why couldn't this be in transit lounge?

[Orion VI]

3 hours ago, Kelvin3157 said:

... why couldn't this be in transit lounge?

Can we put it there, or do we have to start a whole new one there and delete this one? Your probably right.

[Transit geek]

39 minutes ago, Orion VI said:

Can we put it there, or do we have to start a whole new one there and delete this one? Your probably right.



We could put a general thread in Transit Lounge, yes, but since the started specifically wants to talk about the TTC, here would be okay if it sticks.

To that end, I'll say that my favourite TTC route is a tie between 501, 504, and 506, since the neighbourhoods they all pass through paint a virtual picture of the history of such a traditional yet modern, world-class city. But the 501 would stand out due to it being the longest of its kind still standing in the Americas.

[Orion VI]

2 minutes ago, Transit geek said:

We could put a general thread in Transit Lounge, yes, but since the started specifically wants to talk about the TTC, here would be okay if it sticks.

To that end, I'll say that my favourite TTC route is a tie between 501, 504, and 506, since the neighbourhoods they all pass through paint a virtual picture of the history of such a traditional yet modern, world-class city. But the 501 would stand out due to it being the longest of its kind still standing in the Americas.

Good choice. Probably just keep this here, we have had other threads like this before in the Forum, so it's OK. Yeah, it's only supposed to be TTC.

[T3G]

There is nothing "world class" about the desperation and poverty of neighborhoods like Moss Park or Regent Park, which the 501 and 506 (505 too) serve.  If a visitor to the city took a ride on the 501, 505 or 506 between Yonge and the Don Valley they'd be met with a pretty depressing sight.

I'll go with the 86 for my favourite route, since I spent a few years of my childhood living right near Sheppard and it has a special place in my heart.

[Kelvin3157]

56 minutes ago, Orion VI said:

Can we put it there, or do we have to start a whole new one there and delete this one? Your probably right.

You could maybe ask an admin to move it.

But if that is allowed, we would be seeing more "What's your favorite TTC _______?" types of threads that would really be a whole other story

[Orion VI]

1 minute ago, Kelvin3157 said:

You could maybe ask an admin to move it.

But if that is allowed, we would be seeing more "What's your favorite TTC _______?" types of threads that would really be a whole other story

Just keep it here.

[7575]

It's 12 or 69 for me. Those routes were the two bus routes that went through my neighbourhood growing up. I used to sit at the window and watch the Fishbowls and Flyers zoom by. That was something I would do for hours. I still ride those routes often and still enjoy photographing buses on those two routes.

[TTC4120fan]

90 Vaughn has always been my favourite. I can remember riding on Fishbowls, Orion VII hybrids and Orion V out of Mount Dennis. After the route was transferred to Wilson, I would usually ride on a mix of units including hybrids (mainly 15 16 17 18), Orion VII diesels and the very rare Orion V.

The Orion VII were nice, but the 94's always took me back to my childhood, when I would ride them all the time on the 29.

[Doppelkupplung]

2 hours ago, PCC Guy said:

 

There is nothing "world class" about the desperation and poverty of neighborhoods like Moss Park or Regent Park, which the 501 and 506 (505 too) serve.  If a visitor to the city took a ride on the 501, 505 or 506 between Yonge and the Don Valley they'd be met with a pretty depressing sight.

To that end I’ll say the 504 is probably the nicest route, because there’s really no bad sights, and one of the best is along broadview. 121 and 77 are pretty nice routes imo 

[T3G]

Just now, Doppelkupplung said:

To that end I’ll say the 504 is probably the nicest route, because there’s really no bad sights, and one of the best is along broadview. 121 and 77 are pretty nice routes imo 

I'll agree with that, King West between York and Bathurst is one of my favourite parts of downtown, although even King East is considerably nicer than Queen, Dundas or Carlton.

When it comes to streetcar routes, it's a toss up between that one and the 509 for my favourite. I have many fond memories of the CLRVs along the harbourfront, those were good times. 

510 would be a contender, but it loses major points for how much time it loses at every traffic light.

[Xtrazsteve]

I got a list
 

Streetcars.
I like the 512 better for a decent ride on a ROW. 504A isn't bad for a ride on the Flexity's. 509 is a little too short. 506 through Little Italy and along Lower Gerrard is pretty neat. 501L always shows the power of CLRVs. The 510 does takes too long and is too heavily boarded to enjoy the ride.

West End:
32A Eglinton West. Nice route to watch the LRT construction on a weekend
37 Islington. Pretty decent ride south of Dixon. The bus pretty much zooms by most stops outside rush hour.
40 Junction has a lovely view along Dundas
52G Lawrence West runs pretty quickly in Etobicoke
76A Royal York South. Interesting route down to the Lake Shore
989 Weston Express. I find this route quite enjoyable when I don't want to be stuck on the subway in rush hour.

East End
69 Warden South
70C O'Conner. A nice detour from the subway
85/985B Sheppard East. Gateway to the east
100 Flemingdon Park. I liek the view of the golf course down St Dennis Dr.
162 Lawrence Donway. When i want to see mansions 
924 Victoria Park Express zips up and down VP
 
 

[Ed T.]

10 hours ago, PCC Guy said:

There is nothing "world class" about the desperation and poverty of neighborhoods like Moss Park or Regent Park, which the 501 and 506 (505 too) serve.  If a visitor to the city took a ride on the 501, 505 or 506 between Yonge and the Don Valley they'd be met with a pretty depressing sight.

"Nicest route" is not quite the same as "favourite route".

My favourite streetcar route would be Carlton, end-to-end, for the huge variety of neighbourhoods it passes through.

Any bus route that goes fast is a favourite. I liked Finch East expresses when the Orion Vs were running them. Weston Road in the trolley coach days was good too.

[Border City Transit]

16 hours ago, Orion VI said:

Mine is obviously 14 Glencairn. I just saw 1001 go by on it. It's because I live on Glencairn Ave. and see the 14 go by everyday, and it's been my dream to drive a 14 since i was little. Mount Dennis, here I come!

Ooh, 14 Glencairn is one of my faves, too!

The part on Chaplin Crescent always jumped out at me.

I went out of my way to ride the whole route circa 1998, back when it was peak-only and I was always afraid it would be axed.

I vividly remember that ride: it was a Fishbowl and it was very busy throughout the trip. It was almost "two trips for the price of one": heading eastbound/southbound in the morning, the bus picked up a good crowd until Glencairn subway and unloaded almost completely. Then, it started filling up again around Bathurst, and we had a second full load by the time we made it to Davisville.

Glad that TTC invested in the route (rather than cutting it!) and it seems to perform pretty well these days!

 

 

[Wayside Observer]

9 hours ago, Doppelkupplung said:

To that end I’ll say the 504 is probably the nicest route, because there’s really no bad sights, and one of the best is along broadview. 121 and 77 are pretty nice routes imo 

I agree.  504 King is my favourite line as well for many of the same reasons.  It does cover a nice cross section of the city.  One of the things I've always enjoyed is getting on somewhere downtown between Yonge and University, then riding up to Broadview station and enjoying the view across the Don Valley and being able to see the bank towers downtown where I got on the streetcar.

9 hours ago, PCC Guy said:

I'll agree with that, King West between York and Bathurst is one of my favourite parts of downtown, although even King East is considerably nicer than Queen, Dundas or Carlton.

I think further west was more fun.  Back in the day, the west end used to be dead quiet on weekends so if you happened to catch a PCC, they'd stomp it from Spadina to Bathurst, Bathurst to just before the Atlantic Ave. underpass, briefly from the underpass to Dufferin, and then Dufferin over to Roncesvalles.  There weren't as many traffic lights and there was hardly anybody around to get on or off, and they'd go screaming across the west end of the city.

9 hours ago, PCC Guy said:

When it comes to streetcar routes, it's a toss up between that one and the 509 for my favourite. I have many fond memories of the CLRVs along the harbourfront, those were good times. 

Change 509 to 604 and make it PCCs on the harbourfront...

19 minutes ago, Ed T. said:

"Nicest route" is not quite the same as "favourite route".

My favourite streetcar route would be Carlton, end-to-end, for the huge variety of neighbourhoods it passes through.

Carlton's another good, long streetcar line that passes through a nice, broad cross section of the city and High Park loop's nice.  Remember back in 1986 and the line was all PCC for about a year?  That was a great last stand with a bunch of different types of PCC cars on it from the first couple of rebuilds through some really clapped out junkers (How many couplers are missing on those 4400s anyways?) and everything between.  It's always been one of those counterintuitive things but the worst looking junkers were quite often the best running cars because they'd rarely be in the shop and thus would rarely get body work.

I used to have a joke with a couple of guys years ago when St. Petersburg was making Toronto PCC models.  They did a number of all electrics but they were all in original through to early 1970s configuration in maroon and cream.  They'd obviously done their market research and determined that their customer base was going to be largely geezers with money who wanted original condition and nothing more recent and that's what they built and marketed towards.  So I used to joke around that I didn't want show-room condition, maroon and cream, just rolled out of the Can Car factory.  I'd joke around that I wanted beat up subway red, route number sign, dents, giant fleet numbers, orange and cream interior, clapped out junk with rust.  We'd have a good laugh.  One of the friends used to resell St. Petersburg models and got a quote for me on having such a thing made and they were willing to do it at the time but the cost was astronomical because the window layout in the doors was changed when the TTC rebuilt them in the 1970s and they'd have had to modify a set of moulds to reflect that.  I had broken down and gone back to college as a mature student in order to pick up some formal certifications and couldn't handle the pricing at the time so I had to decline.

[T3G]

39 minutes ago, Ed T. said:

"Nicest route" is not quite the same as "favourite route".

Fair enough, but the original poster made reference to "world class", so that's specifically why I brought it up.

4 minutes ago, Wayside Observer said:

Change 509 to 604 and make it PCCs on the harbourfront...

Sadly I'm too young to have remembered anything of the PCC era. While I do enjoy me a good PCC as much as the next guy, and I have some nice memories of those, they're from the Halton museum, not from Toronto. By the time I moved to Canada it was all Cs, and those were what primarily defined my experiences on the harbourfront.

 

[Wayside Observer]

3 minutes ago, PCC Guy said:

Sadly I'm too young to have remembered anything of the PCC era. While I do enjoy me a good PCC as much as the next guy, and I have some nice memories of those, they're from the Halton museum, not from Toronto. By the time I moved to Canada it was all Cs, and those were what primarily defined my experiences on the harbourfront.

PCCs in regular service ended here in 1995 so if you're in your early twenties, that era may well have closed out before your lifetime.  Since then, it's been charters and special events only like the Sunday service on Harbourfront that ran for a number of years up until last summer or that zoo back in September.  Charters have gotten as rare as hen's teeth because of the TTC's ludicrous pricing practices.  It used to be reasonable.  You could get a decent number of people together, sell tickets at a reasonable price and have a nice charter that wasn't too short and without having to stuff the car to the gills while simultaneously charging a fortune on tickets so as to not take a total financial bath putting it on.  But after years of 10% price increases each year, they TTC doubled the cost + 10% a few years ago shortly after Rob Ford was elected, and now more recently they make you charter a chase car that you can't put passengers on and pay for a supervisor as well.  The icing on the cake was that they did a special event for someone at CTV that was retiring with no chase car and no operator - they had an instructor driving - and on September 23, there was no chase car again and there was a supervisor briefly but he left after a little while and apparently wasn't assigned to it, so it's pretty clear that neither are necessary.

It's too bad you missed regular service PCCs.  Since your only experience has been in a museum, I'll let you in on a little secret.  The whole "PCCs are so fast, they're scary" line I've heard is total BS.  Sure, the initial acceleration rates are impressive.  Sure, especially on 4549 in particular, the jerk rate right at the start makes it feel even faster, but they actually bottom out pretty quick.  If you look at the data sheet at the "rate maintenance" number, that acceleration rate's only guaranteed to about 15 MPH and falls off rapidly.  PCCs also had no load weighing* so there was no compensation factor applied so performance would go down as passenger loading increased so a jam packed rush hour PCC would perform considerably differently from one with a handful of people on it.   20 MPH to full speed took a long time and from a standing start to full speed around 45 MPH would take almost two full minutes so you actually needed a good long stretch of open track with no switches on a quiet day with nobody wanting on or off before the driver would be able to get them barreling along which is why I specifically mentioned those long sections of King West on quiet weekends.  Unfortunately, given the acceleration and braking distances involved, that sort of thing can't really be reproduced in most museums.

* Transit industry weirdness approach to motion control that's pretty crude and clumsy.

[Orion VI]

2 hours ago, Border City Transit said:

Ooh, 14 Glencairn is one of my faves, too!

The part on Chaplin Crescent always jumped out at me.

I went out of my way to ride the whole route circa 1998, back when it was peak-only and I was always afraid it would be axed.

I vividly remember that ride: it was a Fishbowl and it was very busy throughout the trip. It was almost "two trips for the price of one": heading eastbound/southbound in the morning, the bus picked up a good crowd until Glencairn subway and unloaded almost completely. Then, it started filling up again around Bathurst, and we had a second full load by the time we made it to Davisville.

Glad that TTC invested in the route (rather than cutting it!) and it seems to perform pretty well these days!

 

 

Heh. Glad i'm not alone. @Wayside Observer once said he liked it too, it's a pretty calm route, only something like 6 KMs, and almost nobody gets on. The timeline of the ride you gave is the most precise thing I've heard today. I have been in the presence of the 14 for my whole life. I remember getting up early on my PA days to bus-spot. In those days i got some Vs, Fishbowls, some VII HEVS (OG of course) the rare d40lf and once I even saw a VI. Now, I'm immersed in the route, and can hardly get enough of it. I also used to ride it on my way to school. Although, for the driver, the turn into Davisville can be tricky, especially when your driving a bus without power steering. Much respect to thoose lucky Mt. Dennis operator who do this route. These days, the best you can hope for is a OG HEV, and while that is good, you start to get alot of NGs, which kind of suck. I still remember when a white NG DSL (demonstrator perhaps) went in front of my house and I almost peed my pants with excitement. (Bear in mind that i was smaller, and probably more naive) Long live the 14!

[Wayside Observer]

1 hour ago, Orion VI said:

Heh. Glad i'm not alone. @Wayside Observer once said he liked it too, it's a pretty calm route, only something like 6 KMs, and almost nobody gets on. The timeline of the ride you gave is the most precise thing I've heard today. I have been in the presence of the 14 for my whole life. I remember getting up early on my PA days to bus-spot. In those days i got some Vs, Fishbowls, some VII HEVS (OG of course) the rare d40lf and once I even saw a VI. Now, I'm immersed in the route, and can hardly get enough of it. I also used to ride it on my way to school. Although, for the driver, the turn into Davisville can be tricky, especially when your driving a bus without power steering. Much respect to thoose lucky Mt. Dennis operator who do this route. These days, the best you can hope for is a OG HEV, and while that is good, you start to get alot of NGs, which kind of suck. I still remember when a white NG DSL (demonstrator perhaps) went in front of my house and I almost peed my pants with excitement. (Bear in mind that i was smaller, and probably more naive) Long live the 14!

The Glencairn bus was the line that passed by my family's first house in Toronto.  It was all red and cream fishbowls at the time.  Our house sold a year and a bit ago for close to $2 million.  I laugh when I read about people being able to afford to buy in the neighbourhood they grew up in because that possibility is so remote when it comes to Toronto.

2 hours ago, Wayside Observer said:

* Transit industry weirdness approach to motion control that's pretty crude and clumsy.

I've given load weighing some thought.  To be fair, in a train where you've got more than one car running multiple unit as opposed to a single unit (ie. traditional streetcar) environment, load weighing might have an advantage because it would measure out and compensate different loading on a car by car basis, which would accommodate different levels of loading in different cars within the same train.  It's still a very round about way of doing things when the variable you're trying to control is acceleration when you're going from mass, force, wheel size, motor torque output, current input and regulating the control package's current output to make it all happen.  Taking a value off an accelerometer or, in my opinion, better yet taking a speed value off a shaft encoder on each axle and differentiating it to get acceleration and using that as one of the control system feedback parameters simplifies the block diagram and gives much finer control.  The bonus in that setup is you also have a channel of speed data for monitoring spin/slide on each axle which is more precise than the traditional method of comparing motor currents between each truck to see if there's a gross imbalance.

The catch is, to regulate each car in a train, transducer and control system responsiveness and bandwidth has to end up being faster than the slack time in the couplings between each car otherwise the whole train'll get averaged as a system and that's not really desirable if there's extreme differences in car to car loading.  The major problem is all of this is that it gets into closed loop system design and engineering and with the way the CLRV electronics makes a lot of people totally freak out, well, I don't imagine this would be very well understood by many either.

[TTC Guy]

My Favourite Bus Route is the 71B Runnymede because It’s in my neighbourhood and it goes to Mount Dennis. For Streetcars I like the 504A King cause I grew up on the 504 and it’s a nice ride on the Flexitys

[Downsview 108]

The (old) 108 Downsview to Wilson Station. 

35 Jane pre-2000. Must have seen every bus model on there once.

506 (when it's fully in service)

 

16 hours ago, PCC Guy said:

Fair enough, but the original poster made reference to "world class", so that's specifically why I brought it up.

Sadly I'm too young to have remembered anything of the PCC era. While I do enjoy me a good PCC as much as the next guy, and I have some nice memories of those, they're from the Halton museum, not from Toronto. By the time I moved to Canada it was all Cs, and those were what primarily defined my experiences on the harbourfront.

 

Meh. Don't feel too bad. I saw the PCC's in regular service (including the two CLRV coloured ones) almost daily but didn't ride a PCC until a charter many years later. LOL. 

[smallspy]

23 hours ago, Wayside Observer said:

* Transit industry weirdness approach to motion control that's pretty crude and clumsy.

 

While the term "load weighting" seems to be a transit industry standard, as a concept it is by no means unique to transit. It's used in other industries as "torque compensation" and other similar terms.

 

And while yes, in its early days (and even into the 1990s) it was a pretty clumsy way of doing things, it also had to be done because otherwise you could have a vehicle which may have had a reasonable acceleration rate with a full load have a dangerously fast acceleration rate when unloaded. The fun of electric motors with nearly unlimited torque at 0rpms, and all that.

 

By the by, it totally existed when the PCCs were designed and built. Some properties may have even spec'd it on their own cars. But I suspect that it was left off in order to try and make the PCC as simple and robust as possible. (And to that end, it worked.)

Dan

[Wayside Observer]

1 hour ago, smallspy said:

While the term "load weighting" seems to be a transit industry standard, as a concept it is by no means unique to transit. It's used in other industries as "torque compensation" and other similar terms.

Yes, actually, the first time I encountered that was many years ago where you'd manually specify an approximate weight.  To put it into context and I guess date myself, it was the first time I'd used a Revox A77 tape machine and there was a switch that you used to select reel size between 7 and 10.5 inch and the machine varied the torque applied to the supply and takeup reel hub motors to account for the weight difference between reel size.  That became pretty common for a while on high quality machines where different reel sizes were anticipated until the servo controls improved to the point where a manual selection wasn't needed any more.  Cheaper machines just rough handled your tapes and wore them out fast.

1 hour ago, smallspy said:

And while yes, in its early days (and even into the 1990s) it was a pretty clumsy way of doing things, it also had to be done because otherwise you could have a vehicle which may have had a reasonable acceleration rate with a full load have a dangerously fast acceleration rate when unloaded. The fun of electric motors with nearly unlimited torque at 0rpms, and all that.

Yes and no.  In a worst case scenario of bad design and boundary conditions, you could in theory end up with something that would accelerate dangerously with an empty load.  That would be pretty specacularly bad design though because of what it implies for moving an empty train, hardly a rarely encountered operating condition.  It didn't have to be done, was frequently not done, and everyone survived.  The main reason it was done was to even out acceleration across a broader range of operating conditions.  You know what else is even more fun with electric motors a 0 RPM than unlimited torque?  Essentially unlimited locked rotor current because of 0 CEMF.  That's when you get into serious equipment damage with serious repair expenses so I don't recommend you do that for very long unless you're in a constant torque situation where everything's designed around that kind of continuous operation or you've got a serious chequing account and you can stump for a rewind job plus repairs to the controller.  But as to the hazards of life without load weighing:

2 hours ago, smallspy said:

By the by, it totally existed when the PCCs were designed and built. Some properties may have even spec'd it on their own cars. But I suspect that it was left off in order to try and make the PCC as simple and robust as possible. (And to that end, it worked.)

Absolutely.  And there was no dangerous acceleration without it.  We all lived.  Unless you're one of the subscribers to that "PCCs are so fast, they're scary" line I've heard a couple of times but honestly, the Honda Accord I owned at the time I heard that one pretty much smoked a PCC on every performance parameter.  You also have to remember that PCCs were built to a price point as well.  They were trying to strike a balance between producing something compelling to compete against cars and buses while being affordable to operating companies and that imposed constraints on features and complexity.  Adding load weighing and another control channel would have meant adding cost as well as the complexity.

When you read about the development program, it's interesting to see what the ERPCC originally wanted as design objectives and where they ended up settling.  Air conditioning was something that got dropped and never showed up until the Silver Sightseer on that one car until the retrofit on the SEPTA PCC-IIs and that's been done on the MBTA cars and others now.  A series/parallel controller was also specified to keep power consumption in check but Westinghouse and GE got them to climb down on that one because of the challenges associated with building something that could produce the smooth, high acceleration rates demanded and make the transition from series to parallel seamless.  Regenerative braking, also specified to keep power consumption in check, got dropped for good reason.  There were some pretty wild and/or dangerous approaches taken to that before solid state electronics came along.  On the all electric cars, self adjusting drum brakes were a design goal that hadn't been reached yet but research got discontinued when the program was wound down so that never came to be so better keep a couple index cards handy for tuneups.

A few years ago, I was reading a journal article that's almost a hundred years old now about the rapid transit cars that were bought for what's now the blue line in Boston when it was converted from streetcar to subway type operation.  One of the paragraphs mentioned how the controllers were integrated with the heating system so that under heavy acceleration, the heaters would be shut off to keep a lid on peak power consumption.  Sound familiar?  It should.  Everyone here was making a big deal about how the new low floor streetcars had to perform load shedding and kill the climate control when accelerating when using the trolley pole when this exact kind of power management isn't news.  My point is, a surprisingly large number of things aren't new and the deliberate choice to exclude and not do things shouldn't be taken to mean that it wasn't possible or hadn't been conceived or invented yet.

[Wayside Observer]

11 hours ago, Downsview 108 said:

Meh. Don't feel too bad. I saw the PCC's in regular service (including the two CLRV coloured ones) almost daily but didn't ride a PCC until a charter many years later. LOL. 

Just out of curiosity, if you don't mind me asking, how did that situation come about?  The so close yet so far aspect of being able to see them all the time but not getting to take a ride must have been immensely frustrating.