Our Board of Directors and volunteers are continually working to fulfill our mission – To be the voice and resource for Canada’s transit heritage by preserving and promoting transit history. We are dedicated to fostering partnerships, delivering value and inspiring innovation.

To that end, we are now undertaking our most ambitious project to date, the Opening Windows to Transit Heritage (OWTH) online archive, to further fulfill our national mandate. Whether it be academic research, support to transit industry participants or personal interest, the intent is that this website becomes the primary resource for Canadian transit history.

The Foundation has amassed an extensive collection of historic material. Additional material resides in the collections of individuals and company files.  To date, most of this is currently unavailable to interested parties and the material is at risk of disposal unless action is taken to preserve it.

In addition to preserving and digitizing the historic material CTHF now has, the OWTH project will enable us to handle future archival donations and assist other organizations to preserve their collections.

We have already made considerable progress on this project since inception in 2024, including ongoing culling, cataloguing and scanning our existing collection, hiring a summer student in 2024, 2025 and this year, selection of a cloud-based online digital archives platform and creating an online archives website to be available to the public.

This project is an important strategic initiative of the Foundation and will be ongoing. As such, it will require sustainable funding and volunteers to make it happen.

During 2026 we are continuing our good progress to date, working towards a public launch of our online archive website later in the year. We will happily notify you when we cross this important threshold. Our planned activity on the OWTH project will require $10,000 of additional external funding for 2026.