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Canadian Car and Foundry

Canadian Car and Foundry (CC&F) also variously known as "Canadian Car & Foundry," or more familiarly as "Can Car," manufactured buses, railroad rolling stock and later aircraft for the Canadian market. CC&F history goes back to 1897, but the main company was established in 1909 from an amalgamation of several companies and later became part of Hawker Siddeley Canada through the purchase of Avro Canada in the late 1950s.

History

Canadian Car & Foundry (CC&F) was established in 1909 in Montreal as the result of an amalgamation of three companies:

Rhodes Curry Company of Amherst, NS - founded 1891
Canada Car Company of Turcot, QC - founded 1905
Dominion Car and Foundry of Montreal, QC

In 1911 the CC&F Board of Directors recognized that the company could improve its efficiency if they were able to produce their own steel castings, a component that was becoming common to all their products. They purchased Montreal Steel Works Limited at Longue Pointe, QC, the largest producer of steel castings in Canada, and the Ontario Iron & Steel Company, Ltd. at Welland, ON, which included both a steel foundry and a rolling mill.

Buses were produced at Fort William, Ontario and railcars in Montreal and Amherst. Streetcars were manufactured between 1897 to 1913, however the company focused exclusively on rebuilding existing streetcars after 1913.

A few years later, CC&F acquired the assets of Pratt & Letchworth, a Brantford, ON, rail car manufacturer. In the latter part of World War I, the expanding company opened a new plant in Fort William (now Thunder Bay) to manufacture rail cars and ships; the Amherst plant started by Rhodes & Curry in Amherst was closed in 1931. In an attempt to enter the aviation market, CC&F produced a small series of Grumman fighter aircraft under licence and developed an unsuccessful, indigenous-designed fighter aircraft, the Gregor FDB-1.

The Second World War

By 1939, with war on the horizon, Canadian Car & Foundry and its Chief Engineer, Elsie MacGill, were contracted by the RAF to produce the Hawker Hurricane. Refinements introduced by MacGill on the Hurricane included skis and de-icing controls for operating in the winter. MacGill's success with the Hurricane earned her the nickname: "Queen of the Hurricanes." She was even featured in a comic book in the US under that name. When the production of the Hurricane was complete in 1943, CC&Fs workforce of 4,500 (half of them women), had built over 1,400 aircraft; about 10% of Hurricanes built.

Following the success of the Hurricane contract, CC&F sought out and received a production order for the troublesome SB2C Curtiss Helldiver. A continuous stream of specification changes from the Curtiss aircraft designers jeopardized the mass production of the aircraft. Eventually, 834 Helldivers were produced by CC&F in various versions from SBW-1, SBW-1B, SBW-3,SBW-4E and SBW-5. Some of the Curtiss divebombers were sent directly to the Royal Navy under Lend-Lease arrangements.

In 1944, the Canadian Car & Foundry built a revolutionary new aircraft in its Montreal shops - the Burnelli CBY-3, also called the Loadmaster. There were two examples built of a aerofoil-fuselage design originally developed by Vincent J. Burnelli. The CBY-3 was in some ways, far superior to the planes of its day (its primary competition was the DC-3 Dakota) in terms of cargo lifting capacity and overall performance, but the CBY-3 was fated never to enter full-scale production and was cancelled less than one year later.

Postwar developments

After the Second World War, the CC&F returned to its roots as a rail car manufacturer. They also made a successful leap into the streetcar business, supplying Montreal, Toronto, Regina, Calgary, Vancouver, Edmonton, and the Brazilian cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo with various types of streetcars. The company concluded a licencing agreement with ACF-Brill (the successor to J. G. Brill) in 1944 to manufacture and sell throughout Canada buses and trolley coaches of ACF-Brill design as Canadian Car-Brill. CC&F built about 1,100 trolley buses and a few thousand buses under the name.

In 1957, wishing to diversify, the British Hawker Siddeley Group through its Canadian subsidiary, A.V. Roe Canada Company, acquired CC&F. In 1962, A.V. Roe Canada was dissolved and its assets became part of Hawker Siddeley Canada. Through a series of further acquisitions and inevitable mergers and rationalisations, CC&F faded from the annals of significant Canadian manufacturers, although the company still exists today.