Buses and buildings: two passions of one Edmonton photographer

He got a View-Master one Christmas, and that’s what helped spark his interest in downtown buildings, as they went up and came down, and the city’s transit system—the two interests that are clearly reflected in his photographs.

His fascination with transit started when his parents took him on the bus to downtown from their neighbourhood, Highlands. “As a boy, I was fascinated,” Cowan recalls.  

He remembers seeing Edmonton streetcars run down 118 Avenue—before they were replaced by trolley buses in 1945.

Cowan remembers the first trolley buses to be used in Edmonton were built in the U.K. by Leyland and English Electric. Then, there were the Brills, built in what was then Ft. William, Ontario, now Thunder Bay, and the Pullman Standard trolleys built in Massachusetts, USA. 

Edmonton’s trolleys came to the end of the line in 2009, but some of them have been saved for posterity. In fact, Cowan was instrumental in getting one of the Pullmans preserved when they were decommissioned in 1966. He also has great fondness for a special Brill that was saved. Brill 202 is believed to have been the last one built in Ft. William. For a number of years, it was used on trolley tours and now it is part of the ETS historical collection. Cowan believes old trolleys need to be kept and exhibited, or ideally, operated.

Cowan and fellow transit enthusiast Kevin Brown did historic bus route tours themselves. The tours started in 1999 when Edmonton Transit was celebrating the 60th anniversary of trolleys in the city. “They were very popular,” Cowan says. “We must have had about five or six different routes: one was to Highlands, Old Strathcona, the university and Glenora. Almost every one of them was sold out.”

The nostalgia Cowan feels for old trolley buses is the same as his feelings for old buildings. “I still have eight or nine bricks from the original Woodwards store that I got with permission when they were demolishing it,” he says. “It was a white brick building. When you grow up, these things leave an impression.”

The beginning of LRT in Edmonton was another milestone in Cowan’s photographic journey. 

Cowan took what he believes to be the first pictures of the LRT cars arriving from Germany in 1977. “They came from Germany through the Panama canal to Vancouver and they were unloaded onto flat cars and brought to Edmonton,” he says. “I was there the night the first cars arrived. I was pretty diligent. I’m too old now to run around the way I used to.”

Cowan believes the city did well to get those original Siemens-Duewag LRT cars, which are still in operation. And he likes the looks of the new cars on the Valley Line LRT, calling them “lovely.” 

Cowan embraces all the transit developments: “It’s an interesting age now when they’re experimenting with battery buses and hydrogen buses. And, of course, the rail network is going to be good. I think each era has had its excitement. In a way, the LRT is a return to the rails.”