In 1931, CN – despite pleading from commuters and town leaders along the routes – threw in the towel on the Toronto Suburban Railway’s Guelph line. This would have been the end for this particular radial, except that a large chunk of the bondholders were convinced to either hang onto their bonds /or/ sell their now-worthless bonds to the “SAVE OUR RADIAL” committee made up of the previously mentioned commuters and town leaders.
This meant that when the CN offered to buy off the bondholders (at quarter value) not enough of them said yes for the sale to productively go through, so it stripped the line of usable equipment and handed it back to do with as they wanted.
This was (almost) exactly what the SOR committee wanted, so the now increasingly ragged carcass of the radial was dusted off, a few passenger cars were leased from the Grand River & Lake Erie & Northern radials, and the Guelph line lived again.
In the middle of a horrific depression.
The story would have ended in the same way as so many other radials saw their stories end, except that the SOR had enough industrialists in its ranks to provide a new freight traffic base (in the form of a foundry in Guelph & a woolen mill in Huttonville) sufficient to keep the lights on up until WW2, when suddenly there was business coming out of its ears.
In 1942, TSR expanded their route by building (jointly with the Grand River) a connecting line between Guelph and Hespeler.
(1942 also saw the arrival of CC&F-built boxcabs 301-304, which let the railroad retire most of the passenger cars that had been used as freight motors.)
In 1943, the TSR arranged trackage rights on the CN between St Clair Avenue & Toronto Union Station for operating single-seat service into downtown Toronto, which worked well until the end of WW2, at which point most of the passenger traffic went away (/particularly/ passengers; the true north had fallen for the lure of the automobile, and the TSR’s twisty mainline couldn’t support speeds to beat the improved roads that were springing up everywhere). But the freight operations continued and brought in enough money to keep the railroad profitable. The single-seat trains into downtown Toronto brought in, at least for a while, enough money to not be unprofitable, but, like passenger service on so many other radials, were discontinued in the 1950s and the TSR became a strictly freight hauler.
The early 1970s were fairly rough for traffic, to the point where even if the railroad had wanted to dieselise they couldn’t afford to. So instead of that they merged – in 1973 – with the Hamilton & Brantford Railway (which had also survived thanks to some industrial facilities locating along the line and buying the moribund railroad to get their products to the rest of the railroad network, and which had also kept their electrification) to form the Ontario Radial Railway Company.
In the late 1980s, the Canadian Pacific filed to abandon most of their Simcoe (ex-Lake Erie & Northern) subdivision, but an infusion of LT&L cash allowed the ORRC to purchase – and electrify – that trackage and keep a connection between the two lines.
In 2021, the Orangeville Brampton Railway shut down, but a few shippers at the south end of the railway convinced the TSR to purchase that part of the line (south from the OBRY/TSR junction midway between Brampton & Mississauga to the CN at Streetsville Junction.) Wires went up & a pair of class O2 locomotives were ordered, and by january 1st 2022 electric operation had begun on that branch.
Metrolinx has made periodic attempts to run commuter services on the TSR ever since the agency was formed, but none of them have gotten enough ridership to justify the expense; wire is mysteriously still up all the way to Union Station, but there are no shippers east of Etobicoke and the TSR has let the TTC know that they’re willing to surrender that part of their rail corridor if the TTC ever wanted to extend the St Clair streetcar further west.