Day: March 23, 2006

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Subway Art: Watercolours by Sigmund Augustus Serafin

Many years ago, the TTC was cleaning house at 1900 Yonge and a lot of old stuff was heading to the garbage can.  The combined efforts of various fans saved some material that would otherwise have been lost thanks to Ted Wickson, now retired from the TTC, who alerted people to what was happening.

I took custody of eight watercolours of proposed station designs for the University and Bloor-Danforth subway lines painted in 1957 and 1958 by Serafin.  Recently, for the Bloor subway’s 40th birthday, I brought them out of storage and was amazed at their excellent condition.

James Bow’s site at Transit Toronto has many galleries, and it seemed a more appropriate location to display the paintings than here.  If you want to see them, follow this link to Transit Toronto.

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TTC Cattle Cars Part 3: Passengers 2, Staff 1

I’m at a loss knowing where to begin on this.  If you’ve been following this thread, you will know that TTC staff really, really want their new subway cars to use “perimeter seating”.  This means that all of the seats face inward and there are no forward or rearward facing seats, no conversation nooks.  As if that isn’t bad enough, they want to use metallic seats with no cushions.  [Let us imagine a short theatrical pause here so you can catch your breath.]

This particular scheme has been before the public twice before that I know of.  The first outing was at February’s TTC meeting where it did not win high praise.  My own posts on the subject started about that time.  More recently, TTC staff showed up at a Rocket Riders meeting to talk about their design.  On that occasion, it appeared that both the new perimeter design and the existing T-1 compartment design were both on the table.  So far, so good. Continue reading →