With the reduced scope of track work planned at Broadview Station, there has been a change in the schedule of road closures. The City of Toronto issued a Construction Notice on June 9 stating that the sequence of events would now be:
- July 4 to Early August: Track replacement from Gerrard to Sparkhall, plus the reconstruction of Montcrest Boulevard.
- Mid August to Late September: Track replacement from Danforth to Sparkhall
- The intersection of Danforth and Broadview will be done after the Taste of the Danforth event.
- Late August/September: Track replacement on Broadview north of Danforth and on Erindale (this is the on-street portion of Broadview Station Loop).
- Early October to Late November: Resurfacing of Broadview from Danforth to Gerrard.
The TTC’s construction project list shows streetcar service resuming in February 2024, but this might be out of date as there is no reason to delay this unless the project meets with unexpected problems. In any event, they hope to restore the 504/505 bus service on Broadview when conditions permit, and that would likely not be until after the track work is finished and there is enough space to fit buses onto the street.
Broadview will remain open to northbound traffic only from Gerrard with a single lane during the project. Local traffic will be allowed southbound until the street is blocked by construction in mid-July.
Here are photos of track welding on June 17, 2023. Rails are delivered by truck and joined into strings by a mobile arc welding unit. They will be pulled into place when after the trackbed has been excavated to expose the top of the steel ties installed here on the previous renewal. Thermite welds will be used to join the strings of rail when they are in place.
Steve Munro 
I am puzzled by the cancellation of the project to provide more room for streetcars inside Broadview Station. Presumably, the track has been ordered and it now in storage?
Steve: No track has to be ordered for the portion inside the station because the only special castings are on the street trackage which is being rebuilt. The TTC bends curved track as needed itself.
Also, it is only “deferred” officially.
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If the project to replace the track inside Broadview Station has been deferred, and the track north of Danforth is not being replaced until September, why is the 100 still detouring to Pape for the whole summer?
Seems like they could have kept it at Broadview for the time being – doubtful that they even need to detour it to Pape at all for the work that they’re doing this summer, now that Broadview Station isn’t being touched. Pape is also really, really crowded now with the 25/925, 72 (and its current extra service), 81 and now the 100 all using just 3 bus platforms. Not a great situation, to say the least.
Steve: I fully agree. This is the problem of making last minute changes. If the 100/72 interline had not been done, things would be a lot simpler, but we will probably have to suffer with this at least to the end of July, possibly longer.
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Those poor people on Broadview…. after all that watermain construction, and the track replacement. Now this, and the passengers that have to endure yet more disruption to the Dundas and King cars. There must be a better way to do track replacement. One that does not require such lengthy disruptions to service.
Steve: The track replacement is relatively fast now that the underlying structure over past decades has been upgraded with a solid foundation, steel ties and the use of Pandrol clips to attach the rails. It is the utility and road work that is taking the lion’s share of the time. The total project span is also longer than it needed to be because it originally included some work that was deferred at the last minute, but not until after the service had been reorganized in anticipation.
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With taking down the eastern ramp of the Gardiner, the lane reductions for the raising of the train tracks for the Ontario Line, all the other construction for the Ontario line, the normal incessant construction of condos disrupting traffic, and now this? Honestly, does someone with significant power just hate east of the Don? What is going on here?
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BlogTO reports that noise reduction is one of the goals of the new tracks. Any merit to this?
Steve: BlogTO is picking up the standard TTC PR. The track on Broadview does have a lot of broken joins (it’s over two decades old) and has been a bit corrugated in places (this was corrected by a visit from the mobile track grinder in recent years). This track is one of the early examples of rails laid on a full concrete base, steel ties with Pandrol clamps, and using rubber sleeves to reduce vibration transmission into the road. TTC folks might think that their “modern” track has only been used recently, but we are now at the point where the original installations are coming around for renewal. Special work is a bit further behind because they did not start building fully isolated track as early as they did with tangent track.
The people who really don’t know about modern track are at Metrolinx where they make claims about Ontario Line track construction including the floating slab technique first used on the Toronto subway for the Spadina line. They need to think they invented everything to prove what value we are getting.
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