It's Jane's Walk weekend in Calgary.

Named for writer and urbanist Jane Jacobs, the idea of the festival is to share stories and conversations about the city while exploring together on foot. (There are more walks today and you can find them here!)

Yesterday I led a walk on the forgotten history of the CTrain.

We started at city hall, and then walked west down 8th Avenue—where, in 1909, streetcars started running. This was the beginning of what we now know as Calgary Transit.

The streetcar era lasted until 1950, when rail transit was replaced by electric trolley buses and, later, diesel-powered buses.

In those postwar years, the future seemed limitless. One could drive and park everywhere for cheap.

But it did not work out as promised. By the 1960s, downtown was full of surface parking lots, traffic was getting worse and Calgary was already trying to figure out how to put back a version of what it had just ripped out: rail transit.

On the walk, Sam Hester, who draws The Sprawl's Curious Calgary comics, talked about Oliver Bowen, who oversaw the design and construction of the CTrain. (Read her comic on Bowen further below!)

And Alec Hamilton, who later in the day led his own walk on the abandoned train station under the Calgary Tower (a.k.a. Palliser Square Station), talked about the different types of CTrain cars we have in Calgary.

After the walk, I took The Sprawl's Pop-Up Press out for a rip. I'd put the press and all my printing gear into the trike earlier this week and was eager to roll it out.

It was Jane's Walk weekend last year when the Pop-Up Press made its debut. I have funny memories of nearly tipping the entire trike into the Western Headworks Canal, under Deerfoot Trail, while rushing to get to a walk near Refinery Park! But that's a whole other story.

Yesterday, it felt appropriate to have a streetcar print on the press. The photo is from the early 1920s, when streetcars crossed the Louse Bridge into Hillhurst.

A kid passing by with her family helped me ink the press so others could print. She chose blue ink. Thanks, Leila!

Doing this Jane's Walk was a good excuse to research more of the city's transit history (which is very much repeating itself, as city hall tries to figure out how to build an elevated Green Line segment downtown). I'm hoping to eventually turn my research for this walk into a Sprawlcast episode.

Meanwhile, thanks to everyone who came out to Shelf Life Books last weekend for Canadian Independent Bookstore Day. It was fun to meet so many people and print bookmarks together!

A bunch of you gave me some feedback on the latest Sprawlcast episode, the gist of which was: we wanted to hear more from local booksellers that have stayed in Calgary and been successful (Fair's Fair, The Next Page, etc.).

A story for another day!

If you value all the work The Sprawl does for Calgary—which is a lot, done with care—please support us! You can sign up here and we'd love to have you aboard.

Thanks for reading!

Jeremy Klaszus is founder and editor of The Sprawl. Sam Hester is a Calgary cartoonist and graphic recorder.