In 1931, CN – despite pleading from commuters and town leaders along the routes – threw in the towel on the Toronto Suburban Railway’s Guelph line. This would have been the end for this particular radial, except that a large chunk of the bondholders were convinced to either hang onto their bonds /or/ sell their now-worthless bonds to the “SAVE OUR RADIAL” committee made up of the previously mentioned commuters and town leaders.
This meant that when the CN offered to buy off the bondholders (at quarter value) not enough of them said yes for the sale to productively go through, so it stripped the line of usable equipment and handed it back to do with as they wanted.
Going it alone
This was (almost) exactly what the SOR committee wanted, so the now increasingly ragged carcass of the radial was dusted off, a few passenger cars were leased from the Grand River & Lake Erie & Northern radials, and the Guelph line lived again.
In the middle of a horrific depression.
The story would have ended in the same way as so many other radials saw their stories end, except that the SOR had enough industrialists in its ranks to provide a new freight traffic base (in the form of a foundry in Guelph & a woolen mill in Huttonville) sufficient to keep the lights on up until WW2, when suddenly there was business coming out of its ears.
In 1942, TSR expanded their route by building (jointly with the Grand River) a connecting line between Guelph and Hespeler.
(1942 also saw the arrival of CC&F-built boxcabs 301-304, which let the railroad retire most of the passenger cars that had been used as freight motors.)
In 1939, the TSR arranged trackage rights on the CNR between St Clair Avenue & Toronto Union Station for operating single-seat service into downtown Toronto, which worked well until the end of WW2, at which point most of the passenger traffic went away (/particularly/ passengers; the true north had fallen for the lure of the automobile, and the TSR’s twisty mainline couldn’t support speeds to beat the improved roads that were springing up everywhere). But the freight operations continued and brought in enough money to keep the railroad profitable. The single-seat trains into downtown Toronto brought in, at least for a while, enough money to not be unprofitable, but, like passenger service on so many other radials, were discontinued in the 1950s and the TSR became a strictly freight hauler.
The ORRC merger
The early 1970s were fairly rough for traffic, to the point where even if the railroad had wanted to dieselise they couldn’t afford to. So instead of that they merged – in 1973 – with the Hamilton & Brantford Railway (which had also survived thanks to some industrial facilities locating along the line and buying the moribund railroad to get their products to the rest of the railroad network, and which had also kept their electrification) to form the Ontario Radial Railway Company.
An upturn in traffic, and a retreat from Toronto
In the mid 1980s, the TSR started seeing an upturn in traffic as the inner suburbs west of Toronto built out, and suddenly had the funds to update their motive power and move their shops from Lambton to Acton (the last customers east of Etobicoke had closed down in 1983, leaving nothing on that part of the line except the shops at Lambton Station.)
In 1985, GO Transit tried to operate a demonstration passenger service on the TSR, but no significant ridership developed and the demonstration ended in 1986, at which point the TSR embargoed the line east of a distribution centre in Summerville.
After hanging on to this line for a dozen years after stopping service, the TSR gave everything east of Etobicoke to the TTC for future expansion of St Clair line service. Which, as of 2026, has not happened; the only post-abandonment use of the line is that the Humber River bridge is being used to connect trails from one side of the river to the other.
Expansion, and experiments with public transit
In the early 1990s, the two Canadian transcons were busily downsizing marginally profitable lines, and as part of the CNR’s rationalizing their low performing lines they put their branch from Guelph to Preston on the market (they’d bid on the ex-LE&N lines, but lost out to the ORRC, and that left their Fergus Spur (Guelph to Preston) as an annoying vestigal branch), at which point the TSR purchased it, then abandoned most of it except for the spur serving industry in Preston’s Idylwild neighborhood.
Almost twenty years later, in 2020, the OSW won the operating lease for the Guelph Junction Railway, and after getting a 99 year operating lease handed operations over to the TSR, which immediately started the process of electrifying the whole kit and caboodle. This has taken a long time, but in 2026 the railway finally started to string 1500VDC overhead over the line. Unlike the rest of the TSR, this overhead is being strung for both trolley poles and pantographs, because the TSR is purchasing class M4dac motors to operate the GJR.
The TSR had just started the slow process of electrifying the Guelph Junction when the Orangeville Brampton Railway shut down, and a few shippers at the Brampton end of the railway convinced the TSR to purchase part of the line (from the northern edge of Brampton down to the CN at Streetsville Junction.) Wires went up – faster than the Guelph Junction electrification! – and a pair of class O2 locomotives were ordered, and by january 1st 2022 electric operation had begun on that branch.
The TSR has a (disused) interchange with the CPR just west of GO’s Dixie station, so, after discussions with various transit advocates – who pointed out that suburban growth wasn’t stopping and the Peel Region’s plan to rip out the rails in favor of a MUP would make it much more difficult to put a commuter line back in – decided that they’d take advantage of that interchange to put on a demonstration interurban service from that interchange north to the end of the line in north Brampton and south along the OBRY & TSR to the end of the TSR’s active railway in Dixie.
This service was not very fancy – seven wooden high-level platforms were built as infill stations, and two ex-PV&T class 10P coaches were pulled out of storage, rewired for 1500 volts, and put into service.
The plague had done a pretty good job of killing commuter transit dead, but the TSR (supported by the LT&L) decided to settle in for the long run to see if people would actually show up to ride this line after the plague was over; as a result, the demonstration line is in its fourth year of service as of 2026.
Shockingly, it almost breaks even – it has a ridership of about 250 people a day – and the TSR is trying to coax GO Transit into taking it over as an ongoing service.