by George Mathewson for the Sarnia Observer
(2003) They had wicker seats and screechy wheels and a bell that went clang, clang, clang. Before the automobile reworked the urban landscape – for the worse, many say – Sarnians relied on the streetcars to get around.
The first track was laid in 1875 between Davis Street and Point Edward and it ran along Front Street carrying freight, mail and baggage. For residents tired of splashing through muddy streets after every rain, the horse-drawn passenger car was a blessing.
The Sarnia Street Railway Company’s second line went to the train station and by the turn of the century the entire system was electrified. “I lived on South Vidal and it was the most joyful thing for me to ride all the streetcars. I knew all the conductors and I’ll remember them all my life,” streetcar buff Jack Shirley once recalled.
Another rail line went to the beach. There, ladies carrying parasols and picnic baskets would disembark beneath the shady oaks of the Lake Huron pavilion, near the end of Colborne Road. “It was the most delightful place in the world – the joy we had there as youngsters in the summer,” added Shirley. “The railway was really the only form of transportation that took you from one end of the town to the other.”
Senior Gord Parsons, in an earlier interview, recounted free-ride Thursdays and how the conductors “juiced” their cars with a pull of the crank. “We’d catch a ride at the school and go up Ontario to the Red Store at Mitton and Ontario and Wellington. Then we’d go west on Wellington and curve past the (SCITS) high school. I can still remember how the wheels screeched there,” he said. ‘Once it stopped to let someone off and some of the boys, older boys we didn’t associate with, ran out and pulled the (wire) off the electric cable and everything went dead. The conductor got off and chased them. Then he came back and put the wire back on. I imagine that happened quite a bit.”
The streetcar’s clang was silenced finally in 1931, a victim of the automobile and the Great Depression. The last rails on Front Street disappeared in the late 1990s when they were ripped up for road reconstruction.