Trolleys for Today

Street Cars Make a Comeback in American Cities

The Early Years
For more than one hundred years beginning in the 1830's most American cities and large towns enjoyed the convenience and efficiency of a system of street railways. In an era of dirt or cobblestone streets and rickety wooden boardwalks these street cars or "trolleys" as they became known shuttled commuters to work, shoppers to stores, students to their classes and generally provided a clean, comfortable reliable means for people to go about their business.

The earliest cars were drawn by animals, and later by moving cables running in a slot
beneath the street. Beginning about 1890, improvements in power generation and equipment made electricity the energy of choice for powering street cars. Although rechargeable storage batteries and early gasoline engines were used in some cases, the vast majority of trolleys drew their power from fixed overhead wires. Whatever the means of propulsion, street cars invariably benefited from the relatively friction-free motion of flanged steel wheels riding on a fixed guideway of steel rails, still considered the most energy-efficient means of moving heavy objects......or crowds of people.

By the end of WWII city street car systems were fading fast. Improvements to roads and advances in automotive technology conspired to work against them and the trend among cities was to expand outward while city cores and older neighborhoods where the street railways operated withered from a lack of investment. Most street railway systems were owned by private concerns operating under a franchise from city governments and limited by the terms of the franchise in their ability to raise fares. As their cost of maintenance, equipment and labor rose, the trolley operators were forced to keep their fares at levels set twenty years or more previously. Except in a handful of cities, street cars had virtually disappeared from the American scene by 1960.