Streetcars

[edblysard]

HNS fan? did you get to ride it? And you know the track is still there, Up uses it every day.
Market street yard and the east yard interchange still being used daily, pretty busy piece of track.
Stay Frosty,
Ed

[edblysard]

Not a big steet car fan either, but traction poses some interesting views. And lucky me, I live in the last city to construct from scratch a electric railroad, with commuter service and freight. Any body care to guess the name of the road?
Stay Frosty, and good to see you back here Lowell,
Ed

[Modelcar]

...You described the quiet city at night and that really brings back sound to my mind almost like it was yesterday. The sound of an older car especially, going away down the street....the whine of the traction motors, and possibly gearing or both and hitting the joints in the rails and sometimes a spark or two off the catenary and then it fades away...

QM

[cabforward]

to find out who a poster is,
hit reply on their letter, or look at the bottom of the letter that replied to them..

[cabforward]

improvements were being made to a street system in new orleans.. new tech. cars would be quieter and streamlined, against boxlike cars from the '20s still in use.. objections were raised because locals wanted the outrageous rumble and roar old cars made on paved steets.. honest, the noise could raise the dead.. especially noisy at nite, when most city sounds were absent..

[Modelcar]

....We have added some clatter [streetcar clatter], I might say...Original poster come back and add to the fair box...Anyone recall how quiet the new [I think they were PCC cars], right after the war...about 1946-47. Our area got a dozen or so and the wheels were isolated [in some way], from the steel tire part of the wheels and it really deadened the clatter sound the cars made before that.

QM

[Modelcar]

....There was also the phase of transportation of trackless trolleys...Similar to buses but powered by overhead catenary wiring and elecric motors. They didn't last very long.

In the east the Johnstown Traction Co. in Johnstown, Pa. has quite a history. It stopped running in June of 1960. Several books exist on it's history. Some info can be pulled up on it on the Internet. It served the greater Johnstown area and even extended to several outer towns. Car barns [large brick buildings still exist].
The Co. had to weather through several severe floods and some hard economic times over the years.

QM

[Anonymous]

Growing up in the 1950's, I liked the streamlined PCC cars operated by the CTA in Chicago (the Green Hornets). Then the CTA rushed to eliminate streetcars so, for among other reasons, they could rebuild the PCC's into elevated cars!

More on GM's involvement in converting streetcar lines to buses: GM formed a front company called City Lines, Inc. which proceeded to buy up streetcar lines in cities across the US, and replace streetcars with GM diesel buses. Champaign-Urbana City Lines is an example (this was before public transit districts took over private transit companies in most cities during the 1970's). If buses were so much more efficient than streetcars, isn't it strange that GM had to resort to this ploy? And now we've come full circle, with cities building light rail lines!

John W. Baie, author, www.xlibris.com/TwoTrackMain.html

[bfsfabs]

I'm not a REAL street car fan, they are only up there near the ceiling. Just some interested and quite fond of the Sacramento Northern. R.I.P.

Lowell

[Anonymous]

You know in the 40s GM bought up most of the street cars and shut most of them down forceing people to buy cars. Just a tidbit of info. And in 2002 CSX lead the league in crossing collisions.

[cabforward]

i'm a streetcar fan, but my experience is limited to new orleans..

i'm an interurban fan, but my experience is limited to the suburbs of houston, where an interurban system was dropped in the early '60s..

[Anonymous]

ARe there any real streetcar fans out there? HOpe so/!