A peek inside Leslie Barns, the TTC’s new high-tech garage
Surrounded by forbidding grey sound walls at the moment, the Barns are carefully designed for light, efficiency and environmental standards.

thestar.com
April 10, 2016
By Tess Kalinowski

The walls

The giant wall around the TTC’s new Leslie Barns streetcar storage and maintenance garage has been compared by critics to a prisoner-of-war camp. But designers promise landscaping work still to come will make the exterior look as good as the state-of-the-art streetcar facility behind the wall.

Green roof

Leslie Barns manager John Deluca navigates the north-sloping green roof that shelters the 26,000-square-metre streetcar shed. A stormwater management pond at the east end of the yard will irrigate the rooftop plantings, a mix of alliums and sedums. Three hundred native trees will also be planted on the 22-acre property, including yellowwood, Ohio buckeye, hackberry, Kentucky coffee, black cherry, sycamore, red and bur oaks, American elms, basswood, swamp white oak, red sunset maple, ironwood and paper birch.

Service bay

New Bombardier streetcar 4418 awaits testing in a service bay at Leslie Barns, where 104 of the fleet’s 204 new cars will eventually be maintained and stored. Streetcars enter through the west end of the barns and move east down a service line, where they exit and turn back on the outdoor track to exit on Leslie at Commissioners St. There are 8.3 kilometres of track on the property. Most of the cars enter service along the new track on Leslie at about 7:25 a.m. and return to the garage around 9 p.m., if there are no service disruptions.

Above and below

Service bays in the Leslie Barns accommodate a two-tiered maintenance system. The undersides of the low-floor streetcars are accessed via pits. TTC workers access the HVAC and propulsion systems, which are built into the roof of the new Bombardier vehicles, via overhead catwalks. The barns are wired with the overhead catenary system that supplies power to the vehicles. The exception is the paint booth - the streetcars are “muled,” or pushed, into the booth because of the lack of overhead there.

Bird-friendly windows

The structure is built to Toronto’s green development standards and also incorporates community-recommended features. Friends of the Spit advised installing specially glazed windows striped to deter birds from flying into the building. Compared with the historic but less spacious streetcar houses on Queen St. and Roncesvalles, TTC employees appreciate the vaulted ceilings and floor-to-ceiling glass, says barns manager John Deluca. About 200 TTC maintenance and operations workers will call the barns their home base once all the new streetcars are delivered, supposedly by 2019.

Electronic dispatch

Leslie Barns incorporates the TTC’s first electronic streetcar-dispatch system. In older yards, operators must get out of the car and flip the track switches manually. The electronic system means operators, who are assigned a vehicle when they come on shift, can watch on a screen in the lounge as their vehicle moves through the yard. A maintenance worker or “yard jockey” provides valet service, driving the car to the west side of the barn. The driver slips out a door at the side of the building and takes over the streetcar.

A softer look

The giant grey walls around the Leslie Barns will evolve into something softer and more in keeping with the lakefront environment. Under a design by Brown and Storey Architects, the legally required noise walls, now a prisonlike grey, will be covered by red powder-coated panels in a smooth composite aluminum and a wavy patterned steel. Vines will be trained up mesh panels. The Leslie and Lakeshore expanses will be fronted by a linear park incorporating the Martin Goodman Trail, wide multi-use paths, grass, plants and benches. Grading will also reduce the wall's imposing height; peek-a-boo panels will permit passersby to watch activity inside the yard.