The Sudbury and Copper Cliff Suburban Electric Railway was a privately-owned electric interurban railway and streetcar system that connected several neighbourhoods in the town (and later city) of Sudbury, along with what was then the town of Copper Cliff in Ontario, Canada. Incorporated in 1912, the company began revenue passenger service in November 1915. It ultimately grew into a system of three radial lines which joined together in downtown Sudbury. By the late 1940s, however, rail service was being supplemented with diesel buses. Rail service ended in October 1950 and was completely replaced with bus service, which over time evolved into municipal Sudbury Transit and later GOVA services.
History
The early history of the railway was coloured by concerns about Copper Cliff becoming a suburb of Sudbury. An earlier 1906 plan for a Sudbury, Copper Cliff, and Creighton Electric Railway that would have connected the two centres with the now-abandoned mining town of Creighton had been discarded after heavy opposition from Copper Cliff merchants, who feared the decline of the town's commercial core due to competition with Sudbury, which had over six times as many businesses. The same merchants also opposed the new plan, but were overruled by a vote by Copper Cliff ratepayers.
Early on, the railway company was run by Noël Desmarais, a local Franco-Ontarian businessman and grandfather of the financier Paul Desmarais, who later owned and managed the company. It began operations in 1912 with a single car that was borrowed from the Toronto Suburban Railway. The car was never returned and operated on the SCCSER until the early 1930s when it was sold for scrap. Service was only provided to Copper Cliff initially, with the lines on Notre Dame and Elgin opening shortly afterwards. The railway received electric power through the Wahnapitae Power Company, which was privately owned until it was acquired by the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario in 1930.
The railway received a major boost in ridership by the decision of the Canadian Copper Company, after the instating of the eight-hour day, to limit the growth of Copper Cliff in favour of a workforce that commuted from Sudbury. It was also around this time that the small constellation of informal industrial villages such as East Smelter, Orford Village, and Shantytown disappeared or were consolidated into the urban centre of Copper Cliff. In Sudbury, the population of certain ethnic groups, such as Finns, began to grow, as immigrant mine and smelter workers could now live in Sudbury and commute to work at the industrial operations around Copper Cliff. At the time, the Sudbury Star reported that while in 1915, only about twenty workers commuted from Sudbury to Copper Cliff, a year later that number had risen to more than two hundred. On the far west end of Sudbury, the area around the Copper Cliff Road (later known as Lorne Street), which was also the route of the railway and which had previously been the site of the Gatchell family farm and dairy, was gradually subdivided and became the site of Sudbury's "first real suburban development." Gatchell became a predominantly Italian neighbourhood, one which mirrored Copper Cliff's Little Italy. Similarly, the West End neighbourhood grew extensively around this time along the Copper Cliff Road and Regent Street corridors.
The railway company was not initially very financially successful, and was unable to pay dividends to its shareholders. In 1920, shareholders proposed that the town of Sudbury buy them out, which failed in a 4–2 town council vote. By 1928, an audit of the town's finances recommended that the town form a reserve in case the railway's debts to the town, which dated back to 1916, were realized as a loss.
In 1943, the workers at the railway unionized, but by then its time was nearly over as the SCCSER began buying buses in 1947. The line to Bell Park was the first to close in 1948 with the two other lines ceasing service in 1950. The SCCSER rolling stock sat at the carhouse for more than two years, finally being cut up for scrap in 1953. The SCCSER was reorganized in 1951 and renamed Sudbury Bus Lines Limited. Shortly after, it was purchased for a symbolic $1 by the financier Paul Desmarais, who used it as a platform for buying up a number of bus lines throughout Ontario, allowing him to launch his business empire. Bus operations would continue under the new name until 1966, when the company ceased operations and was replaced by Laurentian Transit, which was a consortium of local private bus companies. It in turn was supplanted by Sudbury Transit in 1972, the direct predecessor to the current GOVA municipal transit agency.