December 10, 1950
On a Sunday morning, regular operations began for a trolley bus system in the city of Hamilton in Canada’s province of Ontario. These vehicles became the latest form of public transportation launched by the Hamilton Street Railway (HSR), a company that had been serving the city for 77 years by that time.
Between 1:30 and 4:30 on that Sunday, HSR provided everyone with the opportunity to ride for free on the trolley buses. “The company estimates that some 5,000 persons took advantage of the free rides during the afternoon,” reported the next day’s edition of the Hamilton Spectator. “Every trolley bus on the Cannon Street route was jammed during the afternoon, when patrons did not have to drop a ticket in the fare box.”
This edition also highlighted how many of these passengers on board the trolley buses were teenagers. “By word of the young fry, who are pretty shrewd appraisers of the comforts of transportation, riding on one of the new trolley buses is like ’floating on air’,” stated the newspaper. “A lot of our citizens of tomorrow eagerly took a free ride around town Sunday and will have the satisfaction of telling their own tots in the years ahead how the old jangling street car went out in Hamilton with the horse and buggy, or around that time anyway.”
The Hamilton Spectator went on to assert, “And a good thing, too. Floating on air is a pleasant feeling, so is living in it with a reasonable amount of quiet. A city’s tone changes with the trackless trolley; clanging discords disappear, and there is a universal hum that is anything but rough on the ears or nerves.”
On the day before the start of regular service for the means of transit, an inaugural ceremony for the system was held at 10:30 a.m. Lloyd Jackson, who had become mayor of Hamilton earlier that year and would serve in the role until 1962, cut a white ribbon stretched across Sanford Avenue at Cannon Street to officially open the new route. “This occasion marks a forward step in transportation in this busy city,” he proclaimed.
“A few minutes later all invited guests were ushered aboard the three red and cream-colored monsters and they pulled out for a tour of the new route,” reported the Hamilton Spectator. “In introducing Mayor Jackson prior to the formal ribbon cutting, P.A.S. Todd, general manager of the Hamilton Street Railway, pointed out that the ceremony was the culmination of some two and one-half years of planning and purchasing, and he thanked all those who had worked so hard to bring the new system into operation.”
This system remained in service for more than four decades, with the final trolley bus runs occurring on December 30, 1992. (The attached photo of one of the system’s trolley buses turning onto Wilson Street in Hamilton was taken on May 5, 1987.)
Photo Credit: Steve Morgan (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Steve_Morgan) – licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
For more information on the Hamilton Street Railway (HSR), please check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_Street_Railway
Transportation History 
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