LC Gagnon obtained this map of Toronto Transit Commission services in 1943.
At various times, his grandfather - a dairy farmer living near Lachute, Quebec - sent 'a car' of livestock down to the Royal Winter Fair to show them - or to sell them in some cases. This was in the period when livestock could ride in boxcars with attendants. However, there was no 'Royal' in Toronto during the Second World War as the military had taken over the exhibition grounds. So the reason for this map acquisition is not clear.
The first of the TTC's 700-odd PCCs arrived in 1938. In an official 1953 history of the TTC, they were identified repeatedly as 'Streamliners' and not PCCs. The period of Art Deco styling and aviation-style streamlining influenced the design of many items in the 1930s and 1940s. 'Streamliners' they remained into the 1950s. Unless they were operating along an urban canyon into a howling blizzard, we can guess that their aerodynamics were never employed to advantage.
The cheap, resource-sparing wartime printing and dyes are evident in the image below. Before minor computer-tweaking to bring out detail, the prevailing colour of this cover today is almost a uniform, muddy brown.
In wartime, or at any other time, there can be no obvious reason why someone would wear a Robin's egg blue suit when coal smoke and soot were ever-present features of urban life ... unless they needed to stand out when posing in front of the dark interior of a PCC streetcar.
As Toronto would have been an important centre for the intake of civilian personnel into the military, we can imagine that incredible numbers of these maps were produced to help these newcomers navigate in the Big Smoke. As Toronto citizens went into the military from their local civilian jobs, we can also assume that many replacement workers were also coming as newcomers to replace them in Canada's second city.
The TTC information (all of it is reproduced below) is on one side and a generic gas station streetmap (by the HM Gousha Company) of the city appears on the reverse. As usual, the latter provides no interesting information on the location or features of particular railway facilities.
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