It is, by now, one of the most recognizable and defining sights of Toronto’s streets: through the dark of night, peering down the road, you see the three white lights lined up in a row — the small round headlight on each side and the big one in the middle — and centred above them two green lights.

You see those lights and you know. A streetcar is coming. Finally, you might mutter.

Then there’s the rumble, like a giant ceramic bowl rolling around on its rim, maybe the clang-clang of a bell. And then bands of colour come into view, the red along the front, the shiny dark of the windshield, the white along the roof broken by the black-and-white of the destination sign.

For 40 years, these CLRV streetcars have been Toronto’s trolley, an ever-present feature of downtown streets, our unique ride, a design used nowhere else in the world. Now, of course, they are being phased out as the TTC’s new Flexity cars — a modified version of the most common streetcar design in the world — takes over. The CLRVs, it’s short for Canadian light rail vehicle, won’t completely disappear from service until at least 2019, so it will be a long goodbye. But a fond one, for some of us. And one marked by a milestone last week, when a video uploaded to YouTube December 9 showed Car 4000 lifted from its tracks and placed onto a truck, headed for the scrapyard. The plan, I’m told, is to keep one or two for charters and special occasions, museum pieces, like the old PCC and Peter Witt cars you still spot once or twice a year on Queens Quay.

Car 4000 was not, by a long shot, the first one taken out of service, but it was the first one put into service. It was the first one Toronto ever saw — the prototype, made in Switzerland and brought here in 1977. There were complaints at first: the windows didn’t open despite a lack of air-conditioning, they were very much louder than the PCC “Red Rocket” cars they replaced, they had slanted rows of seats in the front. These complaints were eventually addressed and changed. And though only one car, of the 196 that were produced, ever wound up with air-conditioning (Car 4041), they became beloved. At least to some of us.

Not all of us had the opportunity to ride them, of course. Among the cars’ shortcomings, certainly the biggest one was that they were not accessible to those in wheelchairs. You had to climb multiple stairs to get onto and off of them. For the elderly they were difficult, for those with strollers, too. That’s why, beyond simple age, they had to be replaced by something different. Because it’s about time our fleet was accessible to everyone. And the law says it must be by the end of 2024.

Still, for many of us who rode them, they had their charms. When I was a kid, riding them to hockey games by myself, I’d plonk down beside the driver near the farebox and chat the ride away, mostly so he could alert me when we’d reached my stop.

Later I’d come to think of the standing-room area in the middle of the car as hockey equipment storage space, and riding with my mom and siblings I’d think of it as where you wanted to go with a stroller.

Learning the operation of the back doors was a rite of passage for new riders — so many trips featured a tourist who would stand at the top of the stairs calling to the driver to open the door as everyone nearby shouted “Stand down onto the step! Stand on the step!” Equally often, the crowd would then have to shout at the next person along to climb up off the steps so the doors could close.

They had that row of single seats along the driver’s side — the most-desirable real estate for someone who wanted to settle in with a book undisturbed by their neighbours. And they had plenty of standing room.

The new streetcars, the Flexities, will no doubt grow familiar in time. But after their initial novelty, there are times I have found them wanting in comparison to the old CLRVs — the difficulty of talking to the driver who is suddenly behind a plexiglass shield, the frustration many riders seem to have figuring out how to pay their fare (and pay it quickly enough) at the machine stations midway down the car that take a minute or so to process each transaction, the too-narrow standing-room passage along the middle between seats. And then there’s that seating arrangement that makes passengers face each other in little conversational foursomes, forcing unintentional footsie games and staring contests.

And they do not compare to the CLRVs when it comes to the view they offer — that fatal, unfair fault of the old cars, their inaccessible high floor, also meant that those aboard got an elevated view of the streetscape, looking out above the tops of passing cars at the sidewalks and storefronts.

Of course, there was also the view of the streetcars from the outside, that instantly recognizable appearance I mentioned back at the start.

People have made T-shirts with minimalist renditions of the CLRV streetcar — all they need is bands of colour (red, black, white) with that circle in the middle and rounded rectangle across the top.

Spotting one in a Hollywood movie (not always but often supposedly set in New York or Chicago or a generic American city) gave a very specific kind of pleasure, and became a pastime for some people.

Car 4000 lasted 40 years on the street. That’s a long time for a streetcar — longer than we expected them to last, and longer than we expect their replacements to stay in service. That car and the rest of that model served Toronto for a generation, an indelible part of the look and feel and sound and travel plans of the city.

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Those who’ll miss them have a while yet to get used to the new ones. And to hope they serve us half as well.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire