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After nearly thirty years, Toronto's Bloor-Danforth Line 2 subway is on track to receive updated subway trains, with new renderings of the trains recently released on January 15. Set to be produced in Thunder Bay by Alstom, recent investment boosts by both the Province of Ontario and the Federal government promises to bring the Canadian-sourced portion of the vehicles to 55%.
Work to source new trains for Toronto's east-west subway line began in 2017, as the aging "T1" cars were set to reach the end of their operational life in 2026. Coming into service between 1995 and 1999, the T1 fleet was also produced in Thunder Bay by a then-independent Bombardier, which was acquired by Alstom in 2021. Clad in austere aluminum shells and devoid of any colourful livery, the T1s were a stark variation from the original 'Red Rockets' of the subway's early days, instead resembling the silver subway rolling stock of New York City.
As with most Toronto infrastructure projects, the question of how to sustain service on Line 2 underwent years of debate, shifting proposals, and reversals. For the next six years, progress was stalled by complications over intergovernmental funding and disagreements regarding fleet size, as proposed subway expansions increased the future demand for new trains.
The current plan to purchase 70 new subway trains—55 to replace the aging Line 2 fleet and 15 for future extensions—began to take shape in the fall of 2023, following the Province's initial commitment of $758 million. Each six-car train will feature a capacity of 1,100 riders, with open gangways, and wider doors like on Line 1 trains. In November 2024, the Federal government matched this effort with its own $758 million contribution. While initial estimates placed the total cost at $2.3 billion, the January 15, 2026, announcement to increase Canadian-sourced content from 30% to 55% has seen the Provincial and Federal contributions rise to approximately $950 million each, bringing the projected total for the fleet to $2.7 billion.
While this purchase has been subject to much fanfare, with renderings optimistically depicting the sleek red subway cars flying along tracks in open cuts and tunnels, the reality of operations may be far from ideal or fast. For precedent, one must simply look to Toronto's longest, oldest, and most-ridden subway line: Yonge-University Line 1. Receiving new subway cars produced by Bombardier in the early 2010s, Line 1 saw service completely taken over by new rolling stock, dubbed the "Toronto Rockets," by 2015. Despite replacing decades-old trains and later receiving a half-billion-dollar investment to implement Automatic Train Control (ATC), passengers of both lines will note the dramatically slower operations of Line 1's "Rockets."
From a rider's perspective, Line 2 trains seem to thunder dramatically into and out of stations, braking at the last necessary moment to maximize speed, while Line 1 trains crawl along station approaches and casually accelerate once departing. On Line 2, subway doors begin opening as the train is in its final moments of braking and snap shut with the boarding of all passengers. In contrast, a palpable pause is endured every time a "Rocket" arrives at a Line 1 station, with riders waiting for the opening of doors at every stop. When in transit, the grade changes and curves that the near quarter-century-older trains of Line 2 take at speed, force the barely decade-old subway cars of Line 1 into hesitant, sluggish operations.
What exactly induces such a wave of transit-slowing operational restrictions at the TTC upon the procurement of new rolling stock is not clear, but it is no doubt a powerful force in the agency's modus operandi. Should there have been any hope of Line 1's crawling operations representing an anomaly in an otherwise briskly operated system of new vehicles, the delivery of the streetcar network's new Flexity Outlook cars in the late 2010s resulted in a near-identical regimen of operational restrictions and slowdowns.
Despite this, political pressure has grown as of late to reform the TTC's infamously byzantine operational regimens following the disastrous launch of the Finch West LRT late last year. Whether or not these changes will be followed through in time for the new subway cars' projected 2030 delivery remains to be seen.
UrbanToronto will continue to follow progress on procurement of new subway cars for Line 2 Bloor-Danforth. If you'd like, you can join in on the conversation in the associated Project Forum threads or leave a comment in the space provided on this page.
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