Pages on Rails: The Library Streetcar of Edmonton

No one else in Canada had thought of it, and it was the kind of quirky, positive idea that appealed to people living through a horrendous world war. A film crew even came to shoot a short feature that was shown preceding Hollywood films in theatres.
Newspapers everywhere carried the story. The Christian Science Monitor praised the library streetcar’s excellent lighting system and natural wood shelves with room for 2,000 books:

“And how this rejuvenated old trolley must pinch itself with surprise and say: “Surely this is none of I!” For inside, the walls are completely filled with shelves containing a well chosen selection of novels, travel, biography and non-fiction. Nor are the juvenile readers forgotten. A clever arrangement of ‘knee-high’ sloping shelves have been filled with the gay and absorbing illustrated books guaranteed to be of interest to the children of grades 1, 2 and 3.”

Todd Babiak is a journalist and novelist who wrote a history of the Edmonton Public Library, called Just Getting Started. He is also a self-confessed public transit and streetcar nerd. “I think they thought, let’s use the public transportation system to go to the people, instead of always expecting people to come to us,” Babiak says. “And I think the other side of it was they wanted to help make the public transit system seem fun and human and active and part of your neighbourhood.”

At the time, there were only two libraries in Edmonton: one in the downtown and one in Old Strathcona. There was no money at the time to build library branches all over the city, and families in places like industrial north Edmonton and Calder had little opportunity to travel downtown. So those were the places the library streetcar went first. The twice weekly visits were a huge success. The plan, at first, was for six hour stops, but those hours had to be extended because of how many people were showing up. They also had to schedule different times for different grades to avoid being overrun by children.

In his 1941 annual report, Chief Public Librarian Hugh Cameron Gourlay said more than 1,500 borrowers had joined the library in the first two and a half months of the streetcar library’s operation, and he made the case for expanding the service.
By 1945, the library streetcar was also serving Westglen and Parkdale, and in his 1945 annual report, Gourlay highlighted the publicity the library was getting for Edmonton throughout the world in magazines, newspapers and newsreels “The publicity value of the car to the city has never been fully recognized. It is estimated that 45 million people saw the pictures of the car in the Paramount Short Coloured Feature alone.”

“It worked for both the library and the transit system,” Babiak says. “You can see that if you’re building a library system, you want it to be really meaningful to the lives of everyone in the community in every neighbourhood and you want it to seem something that is not elitist or for certain kinds of readers. It’s for everyone. You can transform your life.”

“And then the other side, the public transportation system, may be not just part of our daily commute to work and back, but can be something fun and meaningful as well,” Babiak continues. “So, it was part of a perfect partnership, and I’m not surprised that it spread everywhere the way it did. I know that Edmonton was a bit of a leader in this stuff just because people were willing to try new things at that time.”

In 1947, the library added two bus bookmobiles to reach other parts of the city. But the library streetcar was not meant to be permanent. It was a way to get advocates for more branches, and it worked. In 1956, the streetcar and the two original bookmobiles were retired. Other bookmobiles did run until 1974, when they were replaced with book trailers. A few years later, they in turn were replaced with smaller vehicles.

Babiak gets sentimental when he thinks about those early days of the library streetcar:

“When Edmonton is doing really well, this is the kind of thing that Edmonton does. So I am not surprised those stories came out. You almost wish, that somehow, Edmontonians in their hearts then and now, just held on to that, saying, if we are going to get attention, it should be for these small, cool, inventive things that we can do uniquely in this fairly isolated big city in northern Canada.”