If you regularly drop by Transit Toronto just to read the news posts — well, we’re certainly glad you visited us, but you’re missing the transit treasure trove that lies beneath.

These news items are merely the tip of a massive iceberg of historical and contemporary information on this site — about transit routes, transit history and transit vehicles in Toronto and surrounding areas.

Recently, our team passed a milestone in our journey to archive and detail the history of the TTC and other area transit providers. We completed(*) the very last of our 298 TTC bus route histories, detailing everything you need to know about TTC bus service.

We thank regular contributors Peter Coulman and Jeffrey Kay and our webmaster James Bow for compiling this detailed look at how the TTC has operated buses over the past 94 years. John Calnan illustrated many of the histories with his maps, while many others, including Mike Vainchtein, Jelo Gutierrez Cantos, Roman Fomin and Allan Gryfe contributed information, documents and original source materials. And we thank those of you who donated photos and scans for the route histories, including Rob Hutchinson, Kevin Nicol, Bob Hussey, Robert McMann, Peter Cox and numerous others.

Some highlights:

• The TTC started its very first bus route, Humberside, on September 21, 1921 — just three weeks after the TTC itself started serving Torontonians.
• The TTC’s two latest routes, 194 Aquatics Centre rocket and 406 Venue Shuttle Downtown operated only during the recent Pan Am Games and resume service during the upcoming Para Pan Am Games.
• You can learn the entire history of the TTC’s best-known and busiest bus routes, including, for example, 7 Bathurst, 29 Dufferin, 32 Eglinton West, 39 Finch East and 45 Kipling and, of course, many, many more on this site.
• You can also discover and explore the TTC’s more obscure routes, including Winchester, Gilbert, 1 Armour Heights, X1 Princess Margaret express, 102 Town Centre express and 163 Rustic Road.
• In the 1950s and 1960s, buses serving TTC’s 23 Dawes and 67 Pharmacy routes served wide swaths of Scarborough, dropping off and picking up passengers far away from their namesake streets.
• Similarly, in the early days, 41 Keele buses rolled along a large part of Sheppard Avenue West.

You can start your look at the TTC’s bus history by visiting the Transit Toronto bus page here. And you’ll find the complete list of bus route histories here.

As part of the 2015 Pan American Games service, the TTC put an express shuttle service from Don Mills subway station to the Pan Am Aquatic Centre into place.

* At least we think we’ve completed the histories — for now.

As James Bow explains on the bus pages:

“Well, [we’re finished], as far as we know. The history of the TTC is large and Byzantine. We know that we don’t have the listings for many school specials, or the many iterations of the buses going to the “RACES”, and there may have been a special route that slipped past our radar. Moreover, this is going to be an ongoing project keeping everything up-to-date as the TTC changes its services every month… Still, we have gathered a mammoth amount of information and I think we deserve to pause a little to give ourselves a pat on the back.”

Are we finished? Or do you know of some route that we missed? Let us know.