This one’s a little fun. We start out at the lovely St. Clair station with its smooth cream with green accents colour scheme. The Flexitys look lovely rounding the curve onto St. Clair Ave.
This route goes through some lovely parts of Toronto. There are lots of little shops and nice trees, so getting out and walking around is encouraged! The ravine around St. Clair West station is very nice. Each stop has its own island platform with an awning and a little map, so this route is very accessible for people not used to streetcars. (No worries about crossing into the street to get on!) Some of the stops have a little trivia fact sheet on them, too, along with a community board, which is cool.
After heading through Toronto via St. Clair, the route ends up in a weird suburban development at Gunns Loop. After the lovely neighbourhoods we’ve been through, it’s a little strange to end up in a suburban plaza. This one’s a little different, though. It’s hard to get in from the streetcar (it’s sadly still driving-centric), but once in, it seems to be designed for walking. It’s set up like a little village: all the shops open onto the “street”; there’s no inside, and one is expected to drive to the correct parking lot and then walk to the shops. As a side-effect, once you get in from the streetcar, it’s rather nice.
Gunns Loop is pretty good, too. It’s modern, and has a nice waiting shelter with some well-trimmed grass. The dot-matrix display was only displaying service alerts for Line 1 when I was there, which is a little odd, but streetcars came so often that this was not an issue.
All in all, I’d say 512 St. Clair is an excellent way to experience Toronto, and has become one of my favourite routes.