History
Founded in 1962 as the Canadian division of British Hawker Siddeley Group, the company assumed the assets of the A.V. Roe Canada Company Ltd..
Hawker Siddeley Canada focused on manufacturing heavy rail cars (hopper and tank cars) and transit vehicles (subway cars, intercity railcars and streetcars). Major clients included:
- Toronto Transit Commission - H series subway cars
- GO Transit - bi-level coaches
- Soo Line Railroad
- Canadian Wheat Board - cylindrical grain hoppers
- Saskatchewan Grain Car Corporation - grain hoppers
- Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority - Orange and Blue line transit cars
Hawker Siddeley Canada headquarters was in Mississauga, Ontario. Its formation in 1962 saw the company acquire control of several A.V. Roe Canada subsidiaries including the Canadian Car and Foundry as well as the Dominion Steel and Coal Corporation (DOSCO) conglomerate, which included various steel mills, coal mines, manufacturing plants, and Halifax Shipyards. Consequently, Hawker Siddeley had two primary railcar manufacturing plants:
- CC&F factory in Thunder Bay, Ontario for manufacturing railway transit cars, and
- DOSCO factory in Trenton, Nova Scotia for manufacturing railway freight cars (TrentonWorks), along with the Trenton Forge - the largest forge in North America.
Hawker Siddeley forced its DOSCO subsidiary to close money-losing coal mines and steel mills, subsequently expropriated by the federal and Nova Scotia governments (see: Cape Breton Development Corporation and Sydney Steel Corporation). Likewise, CC&F was forced to shed various assets. Halifax Shipyards was sold to Irving Shipbuilding Inc., a subsidiary of J.D. Irving Limited, in the 1990s.
Hawker Siddeley Canada's operations were then acquired by Kingston-based UTDC (later sold to Bombardier Transportation of Montréal, Québec). SNC-Lavalin purchased the railcar business but mothballed the TrentonWorks plant, which was later acquired by the Government of Nova Scotia and sold to Greenbrier. SNC-Lavalin sold the Thunder Bay plant to Bombardier Transportation and the Hawker Siddeley Canada name was ultimately dissolved in 2001.
Read more about this topic: Hawker Siddeley Canada
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)