Caption: For a time, it seemed like every day was the 70's in Spadina Subway Station. The original decor with brown, red and yellow earth tones was always in abundance, and the mid-1970's-era Hawker Siddeley Canada H5 subway cars (yellow doors, musty air conditioning, buzzing chopper control sounds) were flowing through the station during rush hour like bad disco music out of some Yonge Street venue on a Friday night. One of those aging relics, TTC H5 5733 leads a northbound Yonge-University-Spadina line train out of Spadina station for Downsview.

After the H4's went, the H5 cars were next in line to be retired by new Toronto Rocket (TR) subway trains. 5733 would be retired in November 2012 and was one of the many cars shipped to Buffalo NY for overhaul for EKO Rail in Lagos, Nigeria, but all were later scrapped when Lagos decided to purchase new cars instead.

Fun story time: some transit fans from the Toronto area were able to contact the scrapper cutting up all the H5's, rent a U-Haul truck, and drive down to Buffalo to load up on parts from the cars being scrapped, including such things as number plates, doors and seats (I think they left the musty AC condensers behind). Having some connections, I was able to obtain a pair of steel side numberboards/number plates off cars 5724 and 5771, that I noted as having rode a few times back in the day. The TTC would be able to print some good money if they sold such neat things as those on their online or pop-up merchandise store, instead of the usual trinkets and T-shirts (and the T1's are retiring soon...that's a lot of number plates!).