Canadian Car and Foundry

Canada Car Company was a railcar manufacturer based in Turcot, Quebec (a suburb of Montreal), and later merged with several other companies to form Canadian Car and Foundry in 1909.[2] Canada Car Company was incorporated January 1905 with W.P. Coleman as president and Sir Hugh Allan as vice-president. The company's plant began operations in 1905 and manufactured freight and passenger cars.

Clients included:

• Grand Trunk Railway and Grand Trunk Pacific Railway - 12,000 freight cars and 250 passenger cars (wood)
• Quebec, Montreal & Southern - 1,500 steel underframe box cars with Dominion Car and Foundry
• Montreal Street Railway - 10 streetcars
• Hart-Otis Car Company - Hart convertible ballast cars
• Grand Trunk Railway - 30 steel underframe flat cars
• Temiskaming & Northern Ontario Railway - three parlour-cafe cars
• Canadian Northern Railway - four wooden dining cars

Their products were:

• wood freight and passenger cars
• box cars
• streetcars
• flat cars
• parlor cafe cars
• dining cars

Minesweepers for France

During World War I, CC&F had signed large contracts with Russia and Britain for delivery of ammunition. An enormous factory was constructed in the Kingsland to assemble, package, and prepare artillery shells for shipment to foreign ports. No shells were manufactured there. On January 11, 1917, a fire started in one of the buildings. In four hours, the fire spread to the approximately 500,000 pieces of 76.2 mm (3 inch) -high explosive shells stored there, causing several explosions, destroying the entire plant. The explosion launched artillery shells and building debris across the area, destroying several homes and businesses in the nearby towns of Haskell, Pompton Lakes, and Midvale. The total loss, including the ordnance, was estimated at $16,750,000 (equivalent to $339 million in 2019).[3][4][5]

Canadian Car and Foundry had a contract to build twelve minesweepers for the French Navy.[6][7] The vessels were completed in October and November 1918—before the war ended, but too late to see operational service. Two of the vessels, the Cerisoles and the Inkerman, were lost in a November gale, on Lake Superior, on their maiden voyage. Other vessels were sold into civilian service.

CC&F Hawker Hurricane X on a test flight over Fort William, Ontario

CC&F-built Harvard Mk.4

By 1939, with war on the horizon, Canadian Car & Foundry and its Chief Engineer, Elsie MacGill, were contracted by the Royal Air Force to produce the Hawker Hurricane (Marks X, XI and XII). Refinements introduced by MacGill on the Hurricane included skis and de-icing gear. When the production of the Hurricane was complete in 1943, CC&F's workforce of 4,500 (half of them women) had built over 1,400 aircraft, about 10% of all Hurricanes built.[8][9]

Following the success of the Hurricane contract, CC&F sought out and received a production order for the troublesome Curtiss SB2C Helldiver. Eventually, 834 Helldivers were produced by CC&F in various versions from SBW-1, SBW-1B, SBW-3,SBW-4E and SBW-5. Some of the Curtiss divebombers were sent directly to the Royal Navy under Lend-Lease arrangements. CC&F also built the North American AT-6 Texan/Harvard under licence, many of the aircraft being supplied to European air forces to train post war military pilots.

In 1944, the Canadian Car & Foundry built a revolutionary new aircraft in its Montreal shops - the Burnelli CBY-3, also called the Loadmaster. There were two examples built of an aerofoil-fuselage design originally developed by Vincent J. Burnelli. The CBY-3 was never to enter full-scale production and was cancelled less than one year later.

The work of Canadian women building fighter and bomber aircraft at the plant during the Second World War is documented in the 1999 National Film Board of Canada documentary film Rosies of the North.[10]

After the Second World War, the CC&F returned to its roots as a rail car manufacturer. They also made a successful leap into the streetcar business, supplying Montreal, Toronto, Regina, Calgary, Vancouver, Edmonton, and the Brazilian cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo with various types of streetcars. The company concluded a licensing agreement with ACF-Brill (the successor to J. G. Brill) in 1944 to manufacture and sell throughout Canada buses and trolley coaches of ACF-Brill design as Canadian Car-Brill, in later years often written "CCF-Brill", for short. CC&F built 1,114 trolley buses[11] and a few thousand buses under the name. Trolleybus production ended in 1954; Edmonton Transit System's No. 202, a 1954 CCF-Brill T48A, was the last Brill trolleybus built for any city.[12]

Production of the Brill diesel bus continued through the 1950s. In 1960, CC&F launched an entirely new TD bus design under the Canadian Car name to compete with the General Motors New Look model, but it was not successful and production was discontinued in 1962.

In 1957, wishing to diversify, the British Hawker Siddeley Group acquired CC&F through its Canadian subsidiary, A.V. Roe Canada Ltd.. In 1962, A.V. Roe Canada was dissolved when the Avro Arrow program was suddenly terminated, and its assets became part of Hawker Siddeley Canada. During the 1970s they introduced the BiLevel Coach heavy railway passenger car, which would go on to great success.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s the plant built 190 Canadian Light Rail Vehicles, for the Toronto Transit Commission, to replace its aging PCC streetcars.[13]

CCF re-emerged as Can-Car Rail in 1983 as a joint division between Hawker Siddeley Canada and UTDC. The Can-Car Rail operations were based in Thunder Bay. Sold to SNC-Lavalin in 1986, a financial shakeup led to the firm being returned to the Government of Ontario, and then quickly re-sold to Bombardier Transportation. Through a series of further acquisitions, mergers and rationalisations, CC&F faded from the annals of significant Canadian manufacturers, although the company still exists today as the Bombardier Transportation Canada Inc. railcar facility in Thunder Bay, Ontario.