The TTC has announced that the 504 King streetcar is now actually running on King Street!
For the period from May 1-6, the 504B streetcar service from Broadview Station to Dufferin Loop will operate over the normal route. The west end 504C bus from Dundas West Station to the Distillery, and 504D from Broadview/Gerrard to Exhibition via Strachan will continue to operate until May 6.
Effective May 7, streetcar service will resume all the way to Dundas West Station, but all cars will operate to Distillery Loop because the Don Bridge on Queen will be under repair for a few months. The east end of the line will operate as a shuttle bus from Parliament & King to Broadview Station. West end service will be the standard combination of 504A cars to Dundas West and 504B cars to Dufferin.
This will change again on June 18 when major construction begins on Broadview Avenue and TTC service between Gerrard and Danforth will be suspended. For further details, see my article on this summer’s construction projects.
As I write this, the routes as defined to NextBus (which supplies most data to prediction apps) have not been updated for 504 King or 501 Queen (which starts its own major diversion around Ontario Line construction). This means that predictions for stops are going to be a mess probably for the coming week until the main update with the May 7 service changes is implemented.
Steve Munro 
The new platforms on Roncesvalles have not been finished yet. They’ve had buses stopping at random poles in the general vicinity for the past month while the platforms are taped off and left fallow. Excited to see if KQQR project team and the team remember that they still have some asphalting and interlock-laying to do this week.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yup. They’re out.
LikeLike
Its so frustrating having service come back. Only to see it get redirected or removed again, and again and again. The TTC needs to figure out some way of better coordinating work. Or research some new construction tech that can allow them to change rails overnight. Canada used to have a federal research institute at one time, or is that gone now? But this constant start stop of service is going to really drive customers away. Plus the unreliability, crackheads, homeless, random rage incidents….. and so on and so on.
LikeLike
Just a random thought, but what would happen if they lost Gerrard street for a couple of weeks, say due to a sink hole?
LikeLike
On the home page of its website, the TTC has posted descriptions of the Main Street Station diversions and the 501 diversion along Dundas Street, but not the Broadview Station diversions. Are the Broadview Station diversions to be delayed?
Steve: See the Projects and Plans page which has info that is not linked to the routes the same way as the Service Advisories. I am working on an article about the hopeless navigation on the TTC site and how critical info is hidden. See also my article about this year’s construction projects.
LikeLike
This actually almost happened a decade ago when Broadview & Queen was originally scheduled for rebuild and the big building fire happened at Broadview & Gerrard which shut the intersection down for weeks. The answer would probably be pressing a few hundred of the idle buses into service.
LikeLike
Finally! The buses were less comfortable, and they came in bunches. The structure of the farside stops on downtown King forces the streetcars to un-bunch because one can’t cross the intersection if the next streetcar is still at the stop. This was not true of buses, so they didn’t get spread out the same way.
LikeLike
Was 504 King Toronto’s last streetcar route to use the trolley pole? Perhaps that distinction occurred when the route diverted onto Queen Street in April.
Steve: Yes, 504 King was the last route, and it went to pans when it diverted to Queen.
LikeLike
Any idea on when the on street Church, Richmond, Victoria, Adelaide loop will go back into service? I passed by the other day and there were signs up for streetcars not to enter on Church from both Queen & King.
Steve: They are working on the overhead, but I don’t know when they plan to finish. The only thing that would be able to use them in the near future is a short-turning King car.
LikeLike
I went to see the derailed car at King and Church yesterday (May 11). Is this a frequent (?) problem? The equipment to rerail the car seemed to be cobbled together from a parts bin. The procedure took several hours. Will there be a report on the probable cause?
Steve: Yes, this happens from time to time. I expect that the problem is that the intersection has been in bad repair for some time and is overdue for replacement. It was to be part of the King Street rebuild program, but that has been deferred a few times. There will be an investigation, but I am not sure if the TTC will publish the findings.
There is a more general problem with some of the maintenance work on intersections that the TTC has a blanket slow order on all of them rather than fixing the underlying problem. If this were happening in the subway, you can bet it would be big news, but on the surface it’s just “those damn streetcars”. We managed to run them for well over a century, but the latest design is more demanding of the track structure. One of the great strengths of the PCCs was that they were explicitly designed to work on poor track because so many street railway systems were in rough shape thanks to the Depression. That lesson was forgotten over the years.
LikeLike