Further sales proved more difficult than had been hoped, but in the early 1980s, Hawker Siddeley Canada joined forces with UTDC in order to win a number of contracts with the TTC and Ontario's GO Transit commuter network.

Now armed with a complete portfolio from light to heavy rail, UTDC had a number of additional successes in North America, and became a major vendor in the mass transit market.

Shortly after taking power, on 3 June Davis announced that he was cancelling provincial support for the highly controversial Spadina Expressway in Toronto, rising in the legislature and stating that "Cities were built for people and not cars.

UMTA was convinced that urban rail systems would only be able to compete with cars if they had more car-like capabilities, and they were primarily interested in the personal rapid transit (PRT) concept of automated car-like cabs that would pick up and drop off passengers as individual units and then link up into longer trains for travel at high speed between stations.

Three of the eight ran on rubber wheels, four were air cushion vehicles (hovercraft) including a version of the French Aérotrain, while the German firm Krauss-Maffei entered its Transurban system, based on magnetically levitated train (maglev) technology.

The space age maglev system immediately won the interest of the Davis government, and in the Phase II proposals they selected it for further study, along with the Ford ACT and Hawker Siddeley's entry, both of which used rubber tires.

[8] There were also technical problems; in testing, the complex systems needed to switch trains on the magnetic tracks froze up, and would require a re-design.

Krauss-Maffei continued development of the original inter-city Transrapid, but at a very slow pace and through a series of mergers with other companies involved in maglev technology.

[13] Looking for a site in Ontario to serve as a test bed for the ICTS, the government focused on an extension of the eastern end of TTC's Bloor–Danforth line.

The TTC had already started building a streetcar line that would extend from the end of the subway at Kennedy station to the Scarborough City Centre, a low-density route passing through industrial land.

However, due to changes in the laws governing the operation of GO trains on the freight railways they ran on, GO was able to improve its schedules without having to build any new infrastructure.

[16] UTDC later played an important part in this build-out in spite of these changes, and GO eventually built its own twin-track line to Oshawa.

The braking system was too powerful and caused the wheels to rub flat in spots, which led to noisy running, the opposite of the design goal.

Bugs in the automatic control software led to a number of problems with doors that would not open, "phantom cars" that would appear mid-line and cause the collision avoidance systems to turn on and freeze trains in place in spite of having a driver.

After Kowloon Wharf pulled out of the project in 1983, citing concerns over the slow pace of development in Tuen Mun New Town, UTDC was among several companies that expressed interest in building the railway, but not in operating it.

SIG was contracted to build the first 10 before turning over construction to OTDC, subcontracted at Hawker Siddeley's CC&F factory in Thunder Bay.

In March 1983 Hawker Siddeley Canada sold a portion of its CC&F factory in Thunder Bay to the UTDC, creating the jointly owned Can-Car Rail.

In addition to the ICTS, UTDC now had a product portfolio that spanned everything from streetcars to subways to traditional heavy rail passenger cars and hoppers.

UTDC's Can-Car also produced a number of other products for sales to the Canadian Forces, the medium-sized M35 2-1/2 ton cargo truck and the larger Steyr Percheron.

[14] In 1986 the new Ontario government announced its intention to sell UTDC to Lavalin, a large engineering company in Montreal, Quebec.

This was during a period of rapid conglomeration by Lavalin, which included purchases of the Bellechasse Hospital in Montreal, MétéoMédia's television services, and many other businesses that were unrelated to its core engineering strengths.

Lavalin announced its intent to sell its stake in UTDC, and several companies expressed an interest, including Asea Brown Boveri and Westinghouse.

At that time, UTDC Inc. was a manufacturer of mass transit vehicles with 860 workers in Thunder Bay and Kingston, Ontario, creating a yearly turnover of .US$ 250 million.

ART won the contest for the AirTrain JFK project, and an improved design introducing articulating sections between adjacent cars (replacing the coupling and doors of the older (retroactively named) Mark I design) have won several new contests, including the Millennium Line extension of the Vancouver SkyTrain network.

ART technology has also been exported outside North America, and is in use on the Kelana Jaya Line in Kuala Lumpur, the Airport Express in Beijing (in four-car trains), and on the EverLine outside of Seoul.

In 2009, the TTC selected a derivative of the Bombardier Flexity Outlook design to replace its legacy fleet and make its entire streetcar network wheelchair-accessible,[33] and in 2010 Metrolinx commissioned a large order of Bombardier Flexity Freedom LRVs for newly constructed light rail lines in the Greater Toronto Area.

[34] Although manufacturing of both the TTC and Metrolinx orders was intended to be completed entirely at the CC&F plants,[35] recurrent delays and other technical problems[36] have led to Bombardier opening a second production line at the former CLC site in Kingston.