For decades, thousands rode the Saskatoon Municipal Railway. The streetcars reflected and influenced Saskatoon's growth patterns, helping build the city we know and love today.
On January 1, 1913, the streetcars of the Saskatoon Municipal Railway rolled onto Saskatoon’s streets for the first time. It was a momentous occasion. Thousands of people rode that first day, with one driver bragging that he’d crammed more than seventy people into his 35-passenger car.
Reliable, efficient public transit was an absolute necessity for Saskatoon. Only just incorporated as a city a few years earlier, it had grown enormously from a few hundred in 1903 to 28,000 by 1913, spreading out across miles of prairie. For those of more modest means, who were forced to seek accommodation out in the fringe districts, the streetcar meant they could get to work and back in a reasonable amount of time. You only have to look at population density maps of Saskatoon to see the importance of transit, as people huddled along the streetcar lines up into Mayfair, west on 20th Street, north into North Park and south to the Exhibition. The streetcar both reflected and influenced Saskatoon’s growth patterns, helping to build the city of today.
They did a lot of tinkering with it over the years: double tracking in various places, adding and removing stub lines and augmenting the service with motor buses out in the fringes. There was even a line to Sutherland, out 8th Street, paid for by a consortium of real estate men who hoped to drive up the value of their property there, which was otherwise a long way from anywhere else.
In 1938, the City Engineer recommended replacing the street cars with trolley buses, which used the same overhead power lines but ran on tires, not tracks. The system was getting old by then, the running gear all needed to be replaced, and cities across Canada were ditching their municipal railways for trolley buses.
The project had to be put on hold on account of the Second World War. But in 1948, the first streetcar routes were converted to trolleys, and on November 10, 1951, Saskatoon’s very last streetcar made its very last run.
