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4663 Arrives!

The last of the 60-car add-on order of Flexitys arrived at TTC Hillcrest on November 18, 2025.

This brings the fleet to 264 cars, although one long-time out-of-service car remains offsite for repairs.

Current peak requirements are for 165 cars. About a dozen more would be needed to reactivate 503 Kingston Road, now bus route due to construction diversions, to its traditional terminus at York Street, more to continue further west to Spadina or Dufferin.

Allowing for spares at 20%, the TTC will still have roughly 50 surplus streetcars. Some of these will be soaked up by the move to 6-minute headways on all routes (subject to budget approval, as always), and some by the Waterfront East route if that is ever built. The next WELRT status report is to come to Council early in 2026.)

Work is underway to convert part of Harvey Shops (the building behind 4663) into a carhouse to operate 512 St. Clair and at least part of 511 Bathurst, in effect restoring the function once performed by St. Clair Carhouse on Wychwood. With the longer Flexitys, the transfer table at Hillcrest cannot be used, and tracks must be converted to through-running across the transfer table runway. This work is expected to complete in two phases with storage for 25 cars and temporary pre-servicing facilities in Q4 2028, and with permanent facilities in Q3 2029.

9 thoughts on “4663 Arrives!”

  2. Hey Steve do you know the number of the bus in the picture?

    Steve: Zooming on the photo it looks like 3477. I have changed the post so that you can click on the photo and see it larger.

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  3. Looks like they should have kept or opened a streetcar facility somewhere around or near St. Clair. When they moved towards Gunn Road, they should have also looked at setting up a yard somewhere on the industrial area there.

    Steve: Once upon a time they thought that 204 cars was all they would need, not reckoning on slower operation. They are lucky to have space at Hillcrest they can convert.

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  4. What a waste. There is no space to even store these, what are we going to do with so many streetcars? This money could and should have been better spent on other more urgent matters.

    Steve: They were ordered at a time when we expected to both expand service and build new routes. Dare I mention how many surplus buses we also have?

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  5. “With the longer Flexitys, the transfer table at Hillcrest cannot be used”

    Does the Commission ever think things through? Or is this a pre-ALRV transfer table?

    Steve: The transfer table is sized for Peter Witt cars which were the vehicles in use when the shops were constructed back in the 1920s. Even the ALRVs could not use it and special provision was made for them on the eastern-most tracks to drive across the table into bays on the north side of the shops.

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  7. By the time WELRT opens, even on the optimistic timetable, we’ll need to be in the procurement process to replace the oldest Flexities anyway.

    Steve: Not quite, but close. The first few cars date to 2012, but the bulk came later. That puts their replacement date in the mid 2040s. It’s hard to say what the political and financial context will be by the time we have to commit to keeping the streetcar network, or if we get into the stupidity of paring away lines to reduce the target fleet size. An important factor will be the effect of the Ontario Line on streetcar demand. I think some of the streetcar nay-sayers have an idea that ridership will absolutely collapse when the OL opens even though most of the traffic on streetcar routes is nowhere near the OL stations.

    There is also the question of how changing population and job densities in the old city might drive ridership generally. Many planning assumptions in the pre-pandemic era could not have anticipated the effect of the last five years, and there were great expectations for transit growth generally. Indeed, if not for the pandemic, the TTC would be in deep trouble now trying to handle demand if it had continued to grow as expected.

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  8. Yeaah, 50 surplus like the 4400 works as good as 4663.

    Steve: The last time I did a check of vehicle utilization earlier this year, stats for 4400 were comparable to other streetcars including those in the newest batch. Data trumps trolling.

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  9. Hey Steve. For what it’s worth, Google had this post in my news feed! Of course I always come here but it was fun to see your name pop up.

    🙂

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