On more than one occasion I have been asked whether I anticipate ever running out of items for this column.

The simple and rather emphatic answer is, no, never.

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And one of the reasons I won’t is thanks, in great measure, to the availability of thousands of editions of old Toronto newspapers that can be called up and read on a computer screen.

In fact, it’s something anyone with a Toronto Public Library card can do by simply accessing the TPL website and following the “historical newspaper” instructions.

Sometimes I hit the jackpot when I find a particularly interesting event related to Toronto’s past that appears in an old edition of a newspaper with a date that corresponds to the actual, or in close proximity to the date of an upcoming The Way We Were column. That is how this week’s column came about.

As we are all aware there have been discussions about how to improve conditions on the TTC’s badly overcrowded Yonge subway as well as some sort of easterly extension of the Bloor-Danforth subway that would take it out to the Scarborough Town Centre.

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Imagine my surprise when while perusing an old edition of a Toronto newspaper I came across a feature article describing numerous recommendations put forward in a $1.2 million study commissioned by the city aimed at hopefully solving the transportation problems that resulted from the 1971 cancellation of the Spadina Expressway.

The date of that newspaper was Jan. 25, 1979 — exactly 40 years ago last Friday!

What makes this particular story of special interest to Torontonians a full four decades later are the following three suggestions:

The first was a U-shape $120 million, 14.8 mile surface rail line linking the Don Mills community on the east and Eglinton Ave. and Weston Rd. on the west with Union Station downtown. Without a doubt, an early attempt at we now describe as a “relief line south.”

The second suggestion was the construction of a high-speed streetcar link connecting the proposed east terminal of the Bloor-Danforth subway at Kennedy Rd. — a terminal that did open Nov. 21, 1980 — with the proposed Scarborough Town Centre, which opened May 2, 1973. The high-speed streetcar concept was abandoned to be replaced by the new Scarborough RT (the TTC’s Line 3 Scarborough) that went into service on March 22, 1985. The report went on to suggest this streetcar line could eventually connect with the new Malvern and North Pickering communities.

A third proposal was the construction of a $400 million, 17.8 mile rapid transit line along Eglinton Ave. — shades of today’s $1.7 billion Eglinton Crosstown LRT.

In the four decades that have passed since this report was issued there have been several more proposals to improve Yonge subway crowding as well as the implementation of that elusive Line 2 Bloor-Danforth connection with the Scarborough Town Centre and points east.

TTC riders are still waiting.