Who killed the trolleybus?

[Bergie]

Um, is this a bus forum? 

[Anonymous]

For some reason everything with the City of Dallas is about saving money not about doing something better.  So it cost a lot of money to keep up the buses and the over head wires, so why not take the wireing out of the picture all together.  The buses that we have now are a lot easier and takes less people to maintain them unlike the trolley buses.

[CSSHEGEWISCH]

How about the cost of maintaining the overhead wire?  That was always more than the cost of maintaining track on a streetcar system.

 

Barry Draper 

Aside from the double overhead required to complete the circuit, maintenance of the overhead on a trackless trolley route would be higher because of the additional wear caused by the maneuvering in traffic of the buses.  Trackless trolleys had swivel harps and other hardware on the trolley poles for this reason but keep in mind that the overhead is still near the center of the street even when the bus is at the curb picking up or letting off passengers.

[barrydraper]

How about the cost of maintaining the overhead wire?  That was always more than the cost of maintaining track on a streetcar system.

 

Barry Draper 

[daveklepper]

Trolleubuses were replaced by diesel buses for much the same reasons that streetcars suffered similar replacement:  declining patronage with resulting longer headways made maintenance of the overhead uneconomical, scrap copper brought needed cash, buses could be leased with oeprated costs defined as including the rental and thus justification for raising fairs, etc.

 

Boston has two separate trolleybus networks, one the dual-mode Silver Line out of South Station, and the other, which probably includes the oldest continuous use trolleybus line in the USA, the Huron Avenue line (l936), which also has center-bracket support of trolleywire, also a rarity, based out of Harvard Square, Cambridge, with its underground interchange station including the heavy rail Red Line.   Other trolleybus networks are in San Francisco, Dayton, Seattle, which opened up the Ballard line with almost doubling the patronage of the diesel buses, Edmonton, and Vancouver.   Lots of European cities still have them, and Yalta, in the Cauakasus, has an interurban trolleybus line.  I don't know the current situation in Philly, but I believe one or two routes are still running with talk of reviving others when money for new vehicles can be found.

[rusty_tracks]

  Getting rid of trolleys I understand due to maintaning track but why trolleybuses?

  I heard that the value of the scrap metal ofthe wires was too tempting a prize to be passed up..

Does anyone know why Dallas did away with their trolley buses? After they closed them down, were they sold to another city, or just scrapped altogether? The last streetcars ran in 1956, and I believe that the last TB's were run around 1965 or so - soon after the City of Dallas took over the transit system from a private individual. Seems to me that our busses were made by Marmon, but I would not swear to it. Interesting note is that my Father worked for the local power company in Dallas and was assigned to one of the generating stations where they generated the 600v DC to power the trolley cars and busses. Of course, after the trolley system shut down, he was then transferred to another division in the company.

Regards,

Steve Cumming - Houston, TX 

(a/k/a rusty_tracks)

 

[vsmith]

San Francisco sure has alot of them.

[artpeterson]

Going a bit further on the e70s decision by CTA to replace the remaining trolley buses (the last lines were converted in 1973), its my understanding that CTA did look at the Flyer TB then available and concluded that it wasn't the product they wanted.

Trolleybus activists tried to block the conversion by getting a prohibition on the use of the then-new GMC T8H-5307A buses on the former TB routes, which is why streets like Montrose and Irving initially received 10-year old GMC new looks in place of the 20+ year old Marmons.

Art

[CSSHEGEWISCH]

Trackless trolleys seemed to function best on medium density routes, they also are less of an oddball when their operators also run conventional light rail cars.  Chicago replaced its last trackless trolleys with diesel buses in 1972, by then they were becoming non-standard and consequently more expensive to maintain.  Replacements were also probably more expensive than off-the-shelf diesel buses from GMC or Flxible.

The fact that trackless trolleys are still tied to the overhead wire is also a limiting factor in such things as maneuvering in traffic, detouring around blockages, and changes in route.

[Brooklyn Trolley Dodger]

  Getting rid of trolleys I understand due to maintaning track but why trolleybuses?

  I heard that the value of the scrap metal ofthe wires was too tempting a prize to be passed up..