On Dragon Hill: Riding the Subway

Since we do not have a car here in Toronto, we make use of the Toronto Transit system on a regular basis. We use the subway, the streetcars, the trains and the buses, but if it goes where you need to go, the trains; subway, GO Trains or the UP are the most efficient, as they are usually unaffected by the constant crazy Toronto traffic.

Getting on at the Collage Station

One of my goals here in Toronto was to really explore the Subway system by exploiting TTC’s really nice two hour free transfer program. This means that you can transfer among any of the transit systems free for two hours. For example, if you are flying into Pearson Airport, you can take the UP train from the airport to UNION station downtown, take the Subway to the closest station and then a streetcar or bus to your final destination all for no additional fare so long as it is within the two hour limit.

"Tap", your Presto card to use the system

We decided to get on the Subway at the stop closest to the condo, the College Station, and head north, stopping at every second station all the way to the end of the line at the Finch Station, which is over 13 km away. Once we reached the end of the line, we would then turn around and come back south stopping at the stations skipped on the trip north. I planned to take a picture of each station and then exit the station to snap another shot of the view outside the subway entrance.

Waiting for the train

The stations are all different, different designs and layouts, different colours and different locations. Most are underground, but a few are on the surface. Some are stand-alone stations, where others are integrated into shopping centres or condo complexes. The only thing they all seem to have in common, is that they are all undergoing some kind of renovation or upgrading. We found exits closed, elevators not working and detours around construction to get into and out of the stations.

The Subway to Finch Station

This 13 km trip would normally only have taken around 35 minutes, so the return would have normally been just over an hour, but stopping at every station, the total trip took us all afternoon, from 12:00 to 4:30, and surprisingly, it involved a lot of walking for a total of almost 7 km, including a lot of stairs up and down into the stations, so my new hip certainly made the experiment a lot easier.

Riding the Subway

My original $2.25 “senior” fare lasted me all the way to the end of the line at the Finch Station and it was only on the way back down that I reached the two hour time limit and the usual “Free Transfer” that came up whenever I tapped my Presto card at the station entrances changed to the “$2.25 Fare” notification.

Now we only did one section of the Toronto subway system; 13 km of the “V” shaped line 1 which is over 38 km long in total with 38 stops along the way and runs in a generally North/South direction. There are also two additional lines running East/West, but the additional lengths will have to wait for another time.