This past week marked the opening of a new bus maintenance and storage facility in Hamilton, with the inauguration of the new Birch Transit Centre occurring on June 23 in the city’s North End industrial zone. Attended by Minister of Transportation Prabmeet Sarkaria and Hamilton Mayor Andrea Horwath, the event celebrated a nearly $400 million investment in Hamilton’s transit network.

Minister of Transportation Prabmeet Sarkaria, Hamilton Mayor Andrea Horwath and others pose for a photo-op outside the recently completed Birch Transit Centre, image courtesy of the City of Hamilton

Located on Birch Avenue just north of the Lakeshore West GO corridor and within a couple kilometres of Downtown Hamilton, construction on the multi-acre site got underway in 2023. Funding was provided by all three levels of government, with the federal government contributing $142.8 million, the Province of Ontario $92.6 million, and the City of Hamilton $155 million. This tripartite funding agreement culminated in a total project cost of $390.4 million, a drastic increase from the project's initial projected cost of $250 million. 

An interior shot of the Birch Transit Centre, image courtesy of The City of Hamilton

The facility includes indoor bus storage, bus washing systems, administrative space, and infrastructure designed to support future battery-electric buses. In addition, the Birch Transit Centre is the first transit maintenance facility in Ontario purpose-built with indoor compressed natural gas (CNG) fuelling lanes. 

The HSR's Birch Transit Centre, May 2026, image courtesy of the City of Hamilton

This asset will serve the Hamilton Street Railway’s (HSR) large fleet of CNG-fueled buses, but it has also been designed to facilitate future conversions to electric recharging to accommodate the transit operator's long-term plans to shift to battery-powered operations.

A HSR bus travels through downtown Hamilton, 2006, image courtesy of Wikimedia user Adam E. Moreira https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hamilton_Street_Railway_510213_wide.jpg

The HSR's other garage, the Mountain Transit Centre on Upper James Street, has a capacity for 200 buses, but the HSR already has over 300 buses. The added capacity delivered by the Birch Transit Centre comes ahead of the upcoming Hamilton LRT, which is expected to increase overall ridership and boost demand across the connected bus network. The new facility will help the HSR manage this growth as the city's transit system expands and receives its first ever higher-order transit line.

Minister of Transportation Prabmeet Sarkaria, Hamilton Mayor Andrea Horwath and others pose outside the Birch Transit Centre's parking lot on Birch Avenue, image courtesy of the City of Hamilton

UrbanToronto will continue to follow progress on the HSR's bus fleet, but in the meantime, you can learn more about it from our Database file, linked below. If you'd like, you can join in on the conversation in the associated Project Forum thread or leave a comment in the space provided on this page.

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UrbanToronto's research and data service, UTPro, provides comprehensive data on construction projects in the Greater Golden Horseshoe—from proposal through to completion. Other services include Instant Reports, downloadable snapshots based on location, and a daily subscription newsletter, New Development Insider, that tracks projects from initial application.

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