Collecting Ontario licence plates for 40 years
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1935 ONTARIO PLATE ALLOCATION
Click here to skip to the allocation data table below.
The Ontario Motor League Road Book for 1935 did not include any plate allocation data. The 1935 information is sourced from Joe Sallmen, who provided a copy of the internal government document that bore this information.
All-numeric plates numbered 1-500 are known to have been reserved for Members of Provincial Parliament, although the source text for 1935 says these plates were simply issued to "Toronto."
Ontario passenger plates started with either one or two letters from 1930 to 1936, and contained one to four trailing numerals, up to a maximum of five characters. Ontario omitted the letters G, I and Q in 1935. The dual-letter prefixes MM and MW were omitted, presumably because there wasn't enough space for the wider dies to fit together on a standard-sized plate.
Note that the reserved single-letter, D-prefix series for doctors (believed to have started in 1933) is not specifically allocated to doctors in this list. However, plates D2001 to D4400 are unusually allocated to individual cities, in small blocs, throughout the province, which is not in keeping with established practice of the era, wherein early single-letter prefixes all went to Toronto (e.g. A, B, C, E, F, etc.). This is a strong indicator that doctor plates were specifically issued in 1935, and if so, this is the only year for which the individual city allocation is disclosed for doctor plates.
The source document lists the serial numbers in a different order from what I believe to be the actual issuance. The document starts with single-letter prefixes, and then goes immediately to the double-letter prefixes of the same letter.
A1 to A9999
AA1 to AZ999
B1 to B9999
BA1 to BZ999 ...
However, the city of Toronto was consistently assigned plates with a single letter prefix only. As Toronto was issued several runs of these single-letter prefixes, other major cities like Hamilton, Ottawa and London also received single letter prefixes. Generally, the smaller centres received plates with a two-letter prefix. Given that the two-letter prefixes only progress partway through the alphabet before ending at the NE series, it is likely that the order of issuance is as follows:
A1 to A9999
B1 to B9999
C1 to C9999 ... continuing through
Y1 to Y9999
Z1 to Z9999
AA1 to AZ999
BA1 to BZ999 ... etc.
Based on this pattern, the highest number produced in 1935 would have been NE-278. However, two "orphan" blocs of two-letter prefix plates are identified after this natural endpoint. NJ401 to NJ900 was issued to Windsor, and then, the later bloc from NO1 to NO999 was also issued to Windsor. The fate of the unlisted "gap" blocs NE279 to NJ400, and also NJ901 to NN999, is unknown.
You can view the table in the original goverment memo order, or switch to my hypothesized "Issue Order" of single-letter prefixes issued first, followed by double-letter prefixes. Just click the headings "Memo Order" and "Issue Order" to rearrange the table. You can also put the cities in alphabetical order, if you like. Any order can be reversed by clicking a heading a second time.