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Ottawa's Streetcars An Illustrated History of Electric Railway Transit in Canada's Capital City. By Bill McKeown. Montreal: Railfare DC Books, 2006.256 pp. $59.95 hardcover. ISBN 1-897190-07-7.
As the editor's foreword suggests Ottawa's Streetcars is a labour of love, and the culmination of an Ottawa native's lifelong fascination with the city and its rail transit systems. Many readers, too, may recollect those days, as late as 1959, of big red streetcars passing the National War Memorial and the leafy bowers of Rockcliffe, or rocking through farmlands to the Britannia Beach amusement park. This book is full of high-quality photographs that play to one's nostalgia, and the fact that the research and writing occurred over a number of decades and largely while McKeown lived thousands of kilometres away in Osaka, Japan, provides an enhanced appreciation for his dedication. McKeown, who did not live to see publication of the book, provides a thorough coverage of Ottawa's street-railway transit system from its earliest origins in the late 1860s as a series of horse-drawn omnibuses and sleighs. He carries the story into the era of electric cars, starting in the 1890s, and follows it through more or less chronologically to the phasing out of the electric railway after World War II under the Ottawa Transportation Commission. While not central to the work, a discussion...