For years, Rhéaume Laplante worried Ottawa’s last remaining 600-series streetcar would never leave storage again.
The retired OC Transpo auto body technician and dozens of volunteers had spent thousands of hours restoring Streetcar 696 before the project stalled in 2023, when the City of Ottawa moved the car into locked storage near Navan after OC Transpo said it needed its garage space back.
Once the streetcar was relocated, volunteers were no longer allowed to work on it.
Now the streetcar is finally getting a second life.
Streetcar 696 has moved to the Railway Museum of Eastern Ontario in Smiths Falls, where museum officials say restoration work will resume right away to get the historic vehicle running on rails again.
“It’s a weight off my shoulders,” Laplante said. “Now we have the light at the end of the tunnel.”
The move is a major breakthrough for a project that for years has lacked a permanent home.
Tony Humphrey, president of the Railway Museum of Eastern Ontario board, said the museum began discussions this spring after hearing the restoration project had stalled.
“We don’t want historical objects that people should see locked away in a garage,” he said.
Humphrey said the museum had officially taken ownership of the streetcar from the City of Ottawa and planned to continue the restoration alongside many of the volunteers who spent years rebuilding it.
When museum representatives first saw the car in storage in April, Humphrey said they were “astounded by the beauty of it” and “the amazing condition the car has been put in by the volunteers.”
He said the plan was to eventually have visitors riding the streetcar around museum property. Officials hope to have it moving around the grounds by fall, initially pulled by a locomotive while crews continue work on its traction motors.
“It’s about 90 per cent complete,” Humphrey said. “It’s an amazing job they have done on it.”
The move to Smiths Falls may take the streetcar outside Ottawa, but Humphrey said the project would remain tied to the capital.
“Eighty-five per cent of the people coming to our museum are from Ottawa,” he said. “What an ideal place to display it.”
Streetcar 696 is believed to be Ottawa’s last remaining 600-series streetcar, a relic from the electric rail era when streetcars carried passengers across the city starting in 1891 and lasting until service ended in 1959.
For Laplante, seeing the streetcar finally move again after years in storage feels emotional.
“It’s a great feeling to say that it will be a running car,” he said.
Longtime volunteer George Rubli, who worked on the project for roughly 25 years, said the move gave the streetcar something it had been missing for years.
“It finally has a purpose,” Rubli said. “I’m happy that it’s actually going out to Smiths Falls and has a future.”
Tuesday’s move involved hauling the 109-year-old streetcar on a flatbed truck from the storage site near Navan to Smiths Falls. Additional trucks carried other parts and equipment connected to the project.
Humphrey said one of the most important parts of the transition was that the original volunteers would remain involved.
“I don’t just get the streetcar,” he said. “I get the volunteers from Ottawa, too.”
Volunteers on the restoration project plan to commute to Smiths Falls once or twice a week to continue working on the car.
Among them is longtime volunteer Ken Hollington, who said the project became much bigger than restoring a historic transit vehicle.
Over the years, high school shop classes and teens in the Ottawa Community Youth Diversion Program worked alongside volunteers to help restore the car.
“We’ve had over the years so many kids from the high schools involved,” Hollington said. “Hopefully they’ll get the word that it’s going to be out there and they’ll be able to come and see the work they did.”
Humphrey said he hoped the streetcar’s next chapter would help introduce a new generation to a piece of Ottawa history many have forgotten.
“How many people in Ottawa even know that streetcars were built in Ottawa?” he said. “It’s the preservation of a little bit of history.”
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