I was part of the team that designed all of the roads in this Derry District, as it was known circa 1986 to about 1993.
Hwy 410 to 10 east to west, Hwy 401 north to the HV power transmission corridor at top end of Missisauga.
(The Derry and Hurontario roads themselves date back to mid 1850/60's as original township survey roads).
I was the circuiting planner and power cables and switch gear and streetlighting designer.
Huge swaths of idle land were serviced with roads, water, sewer, storm drianage, power, telephone, natural gas.
I put a lot of pad mounted switch gear in on thta project
And they used to have 54 week deliver times after you paid for them in full, about 35K each in 1990 dollars.
The cable company declined to place any ducts in joint use trench.
A decision that they regretted once they become a competitor to the phone company to deliver data connectivity.
This was a first area to use 347V power to feed special 347V ballast to run the street lighting lamps. There was none of the usual 120/240V power available anywhere.
I put in pad mount small 600/347 streetlight feed transformers on daylight corners of road intersection to power them.
And wrote big notes on the plans it was 347V level supply. Which could feed long circuits, which this job had.
The Contractor doing the streelight poles used ordinary house wire up the pole from the fuse in the handhole like they had for years
That wire is only rated for 300V service.
So it lasted about 8 months before it all arced and tracked where insulation was breaking down fast.
That was someone elses expensive screw up to fix once the error was discovered.
Ate up a lot of fuses that blew just like they were suppose to, feeding into a fault.
But if the break down was slow, a lot of fuses did not blow, and the slow arcing wire insulation just melted and fused to the inside of the pole.
Funny how you forget the jobs that go right, and recall screw ups from 30 years ago like yesterday.
The area was planned to be light manufacturing and distribution and warehousing.
Some of that came true.
We actually demolished a cul de sac 4 years after it was built so a huge tire warehouse could take all the lots in the whole cul de sac, street and all.
And distribution and some light manufacturing came true too.
But the movie theatre and surrounding restaurants and bars and entertinment attractions were a big surprise.
The dumpy road houses at the old 10/Derry intersections hung on decades longer than projected.
But the light rail line going up Hwy 10 should intensify the area pretty fast in the next 20 years.
The traveller hotels along Derry east of Hwy 10 were never planned to be glamourous.
But the construction proceeded quite quickly, as the hotel chains projected a strong demand, and they were right.
As I recall they paid $7500 to another developer to buy the rights to earlier delivery of a transformer that the utility had on order for a different site in town.
Building transfomers are made to order.
There is no 'in stock tranformer store' unless the utility has a spare you place an order to replce soon after they install their spare on your job.
Off topic
Just providing a healthy dollop of local history of the area as it developed to what we see today.
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