The Canadian Car & Foundry Company, Limited, and from 1957 onwards the Canadian Car Company Limited, was a manufacturer of buses, railway rolling stock, forestry equipment, and later aircraft for the Canadian market. CC&F history goes back to 1897, but the main company was established in 1909 from an amalgamation of several companies and later became part of Hawker Siddeley Canada through the purchase by A.V. Roe Canada in 1957. Today the remaining factories are part of Alstom after its acquisition of Bombardier Transportation completed in 2021.

Canadian Car was one of three corporate combinations formed by the Lord Beaverbrook in 1909, the others being Canada Cement and Stelco.

History

Canadian Car & Foundry (CC&F) was established in 1909 in Montreal as the result of an amalgamation of three companies:

  • Rhodes Curry Company of Amherst, NS - founded 1891
  • Canada Car Company of Turcot, QC - founded 1905
  • Dominion Car and Foundry of Montreal, QC

In 1911 the CC&F Board of Directors recognized that the company could improve its efficiency if they were able to produce their own steel castings, a component that was becoming common to all their products. They purchased Montreal Steel Works Limited at Longue-Pointe, the largest producer of steel castings in Canada, and the Ontario Iron & Steel Company, Ltd. at Welland, ON, which included both a steel foundry and a rolling mill.

Buses and Forestry Equipment were produced at Fort William, Ontario and railcars in Montreal and Amherst. Streetcars were manufactured between 1897 and 1913, however the company focused exclusively on rebuilding existing streetcars after 1913.

A few years later, CC&F acquired the assets of Pratt & Letchworth, a Brantford, ON, rail car manufacturer. In the latter part of World War I, the expanding company opened a new plant in Fort William (now Thunder Bay) to manufacture rail cars and ships which included the French minesweepers Inkerman and Cerisoles which were both lost in Lake Superior; the Amherst plant started by Rhodes & Curry in Amherst was closed in 1931. In an attempt to enter the aviation market, CC&F produced a small series of Grumman G.23 Goblin aircraft under licence and developed an unsuccessful, indigenous-designed fighter biplane, the Gregor FDB-1.

Canada Car Company

thumb|Portable power plant built by Canadian Car and Foundry

Canada Car Company was a railcar manufacturer based in Turcot, Quebec (a suburb of Montreal), which later merged with several other companies to form Canadian Car and Foundry in 1909. 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

First World War

thumb|right|[[Navarin-class minesweeper|Navarin-class minesweepers]]

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 11 January 1917, a fire started in one of the buildings. In four hours, the fire spread to the approximately 500,000 pieces of 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 town of Lyndhurst, New Jersey, and was visible from New York City. The total loss, including the ordnance, was estimated at $16,750,000 (equivalent to $ million in ).

Canadian Car and Foundry had a contract to build 12 Navarin-class minesweepers for the French Navy.

Second World War

thumb|CC&F [[Hawker Hurricane X on a test flight over Fort William, Ontario]]

thumb|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.

Following the success of the Hurricane contract, CC&F sought out and received a production order for the 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 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. 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.

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.

Customers

  • British Columbia Electric Railway
  • Canadian Northern Railways
  • Canadian Pacific Railway
  • Canadian National Railways
  • Chambly Transport
  • Edmonton Transit System
  • Grand Trunk Railway
  • Hamilton Street Railway
  • Intercolonial Railway
  • Nova Scotia Light and Power Company, Limited
  • Ottawa Transportation Commission
  • Quebec Railway, Light and Power Company (later Québec Autobus, post–1959)
  • Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF)
  • Société de transport de Montréal
  • Toronto Transportation Commission
  • United States Air Force (USAF)

Preservation

Many CC&F-built buses have been preserved as historic vehicles, some in operating condition. For example, the Transit Museum Society, in Vancouver, has at least seven CC&F buses in its collection, including two CC&F-Brill trolleybuses.

Leadership

President

  1. Nathaniel Curry, 29 October 1909 – 30 January 1919
  2. Wilson Workman Butler, 30 January 1919– 18 June 1937 †
  3. Victor Montague Drury, 1 September 1937– 21 April 1953
  4. Edwin Joseph Cosford, 21 April 1953 – June 1957
  5. Allan Cavanagh MacDonald, June 1957 – 1 December 1957
  6. Stephen Gately Harwood, 1 December 1957 – November 1960

Chairman of the Board

  1. Nathaniel Curry, 30 January 1919 – 23 October 1931 †
  2. Sir Roy Hardy Dobson, October 1955 – June 1957
  3. Edwin Joseph Cosford, June 1957 – March 1960

See also

  • J. G. Brill and Company
  • Preston Car Company
  • Ottawa Car Company
  • Niles Car and Manufacturing Company
  • Noorduyn Aviation - CC&F later built their Norseman utility aircraft (1946)
  • American Car and Foundry

Notes

Bibliography

  • Brill Trolley
  • Transit Toronto All Canadian PCC
  • Canadian Car and Foundry Co. Collection McGill University Library & Archives.
  • Canadian Car & Foundry Co. Ltd. Corporate Reports – McGill University Library & Archives