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“The demand for development built the streetcar lines and the streetcar lines drew the development to particular locations,” Wyatt explains.

They often built out into undeveloped spaces, but then the houses came and the riders came from the houses.”

City bylaws allowed council to demand a line be built anywhere within city limits so long as there were at least 400 people over the age of five living within a quarter mile of the route.

New manufacturing hubs saw lines stretch to the flour mills on Sutherland Avenue, the cattle Stockyards east of the then-municipality of St. Boniface, the Weston Shops industrial hub in the west end of the city and the new university deep in the city’s south.

By 1914, the population had exploded and the streetcar network had extended to the burgeoning neighbourhoods of Kildonan, Tuxedo, Charleswood, St. Vital and St. Norbert. The western line on Portage Avenue ran as far as the market town of Headingley, beyond city limits. One northern line ran all the way to the nearby municipalities of Selkirk and Stonewall.

“If you look at a map of Winnipeg today … those [neighbourhoods] were mapping the streetcar lines,” Wyatt says.

But the streetcar’s dominance was not to last forever.

The first automobiles — mostly a type of taxi called jitneys — began sharing the streets with the electric streetcars during the First World War. There were just 663 vehicles registered in 1915, but they eventually caused such a dip in transit ridership that council opted to temporarily ban them.

More foreboding still: gasoline-powered buses had made their first appearance in Winnipeg in 1918 to serve as a feeder route from the growing Wolseley neighbourhood to the streetcars.

To make matters more complicated, the 1919 General Strike saw streetcar expansion grind to a halt. The strike culminated with the infamous “Bloody Saturday” clash, where strikers attempted to topple a streetcar in front of City Hall, prompting a violent and deadly encounter with police.

Transit ridership was expected to rebound through the 1920s; that year a peak 65.2 million passengers rode the streetcar lines — double the the 32.8 million trips logged on Winnipeg Transit buses in 2022. But three years later ridership dipped as vehicle registrations climbed rapidly to nearly 17,000 by 1923.

“The depression and the rise of the automobile changed the economics for public transit,” Wyatt explains, referring to the vicious drought cycle and 1929 stock market crash that hobbled the economy in the 1930s. “If it was profitable before, it was certainly losing its profitability — cost-cutting was the order of the day.”

Maintaining the infrastructure of an electric rail system was costly: the company was responsible for maintaining its rail cars, overhead wire system, tracks and the sidewalks and roadways they ran down.

Buses, which had no need for rail infrastructure, were thought to be cheaper and more efficient on low-density routes. As traffic slowed on the electric rails, “bustitution, as Baker calls it, began. Austin’s inaugural River Avenue route was the first to be scrapped and replaced by gas motors. Mass layoffs at the flour mills and factories shuttered the Sutherland line. Other lightly used routes soon followed.

But gasoline buses hadn’t earned the same reputation for reliability as the streetcars just yet, and Winnipeg wasn’t ready to do away with electric-powered transport.

“Winnipeg was again innovative with trolley buses,” Wyatt says.

Trolley buses had begun popping up across the United States in the 1930s as an alternative to the streetcar. While they still relied on overhead power lines to run the motors, they weren’t hindered by the need for tracks, making them a flexible — and significantly cheaper — public transit system. Montreal introduced the electric trolley in 1937. Winnipeg followed suit in 1938.

Use soared on trolley buses as the Second World War prompted restrictions on car manufacturing and drove residents back into the welcoming arms of public transit. As each streetcar line reached the end of its life, it was replaced by a smaller, cheaper and more efficient trolley.

Winnipeg reached its all-time peak transit ridership in 1946 with 105 million passenger trips.

The last streetcars — as the first — were paraded through a crowd of eager onlookers in September 1955. The brightly painted cars were decorated with mournful faces and banners decrying the rise of the bus as they made their funeral march down Portage Avenue.

The trolley buses lasted another 15 years, but the rise of the diesel bus in the 1960s brought an eventual death knell for the overhead-electric transit system.

Agnew says the shift was driven by engine manufacturers who discovered diesel as a cheap alternative to gasoline, and began promoting their engines as a new source of power for public transit.

“I don’t want to say they sold a bill of goods,” Agnew says. “But they went out and promoted their engine, and someone said OK to it, and someone else said OK, and then the trend starts.”

At the same time, the personal automobile had taken off in Winnipeg with an estimated 92,000 vehicles by 1957. Transit ridership was down, roads were crowded with cars and people wanted space to drive and places to park.

The diesel bus emerged as a more reliable and flexible way to navigate the busy streets.

“Not only had they eliminated the railway tracks in the street, but they’d also eliminated the electric infrastructure of overhead lines and electric substations,” Wyatt says. “It came down to cost, as it always seemed to, because they were cheaper to run.”

Agnew has fond memories of riding the trolley buses as a child. They weren’t perfect — the arms still slipped off the wires, stalling buses in intersections while conductors fiddled with the connection. He remembers the electric trolley buses as quiet, and fundamentally “an improvement on the streetcar,” he says.

When the trolleys faded, replaced by their diesel counterparts, “it was just another bus.”

The streetcars and trolleys were stripped for parts and left to rot in “boneyards,” he says. Only one — Streetcar 356, which Agnew has been helping restore — survives today. Some of the old tracks were pulled up, but most were simply buried under new asphalt.

The streetcar, fundamental to Winnipeg’s history, was all but erased from its collective memory.

And though it wasn’t a priority, Winnipeg was an early adopter of emissions-free transit. You didn t think of the environment or anything like that back then,” Agnew says. Today, of course, things have changed. Winnipeg is just one of many cities planning a cleaner, lower emissions transportation network.

In a twist of fate, local company New Flyer Industries — which manufactured Winnipeg’s first diesel buses under the name Western Flyer in 1967 — secured a contract in 2022 to produce up to 166 battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell buses for the city over the next four years. With electric bus technology will come a new era of electric transit infrastructure, including charging stations, hydrogen production capacity and a re-configuration of the transit network.