Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

[tonyb]

Unless things have changed since I moved away, "trackless trolleys," with overheard wires, are still much in evidence in Seattle.

 

[basbol13]

What still amazes me about them was the acceleration on the trolley buses. Late at night on a route with little traffic and a wide street (such as Irving Park Road west of Central) , a driver could "open it up:" the speed limit was 30 miles an hour but topping 45 as the wires above literally sang was not unusual. They got rid of 'em in 1973: maintaining the wire on a trolley bus route was six times the cost of a propane (later diesel) bus route. A recent vacation to Vancouver was a trip down memory lane for me as far as riding the trolley buses.

A little known fact was that a bus driver did not need a driver's license to pilot a trolley bus for the Chicago Transit Authority or predecessor Chicago Surface Lines: the electric buses were street railways under law.

Unless things have changed since I moved away, "trackless trolleys," with overheard wires, are still much in evidence in Seattle.

Unless things have changed since I moved away, "trackless trolleys," with overheard wires, are still much in evidence in Seattle.

I looked it up and you are right. But tell me which one would you consider a "working trackless trolly" or a yuppy mobile?

 

[basbol13]

Then again, I remember when I was probably four or five, I rode regularly with my parents on track trollys which I know haven't died out like in Frisco. I've have ridden in the Frisco Trollys and really a Frisco Trolly can't hold a candle to THE GREEN HORNET!!!!!!!!!!!!! in style, grace and speed. It's like comparing a VW to a Ferarri.

 

[tonyb]

I looked it up and you are right. But tell me which one would you consider a "working trackless trolly" or a yuppy mobile?

View attachment 63996

When I first moved there, in 1968, the transit agency was running "trackless trolleys" dating from the '40s, I would guess. For 20 years I lived near the trolley "barn," an assemblage of one-story wood-frame structures at 14th and Jefferson, on land that is now an athletic field for Seattle University.

In more recent years some trolley mechanics volunteered their services in restoring a real old one, which was put into occasional service.

 

[tonyb]

Then again, I remember when I was probably four or five, I rode regularly with my parents on track trollys which I know haven't died out like in Frisco. I've have ridden in the Frisco Trollys and really a Frisco Trolly can't hold a candle to THE GREEN HORNET!!!!!!!!!!!!! in style, grace and speed. It's like comparing a VW to a Ferarri.

Isn't there a collection of restored trolleys running on Market Street in SF?

 

[Fading Fast]

...They got rid of 'em in 1973: maintaining the wire on a trolley bus route was six times the cost of a propane (later diesel) bus route....

I thought they were replaced by buses owing to some back-door dealing from GM and other bus sellers and not because they were less economically to run (I thought the opposite was true and it would have been a smarter economic decision to keep running them).

But if true that buses are cheaper, then that's interesting as, all this time, I thought in a fair / honest world trollies would still be with us, but maybe the right cost-benefit decision for the taxpayer was to replace them with buses?

 

[ChiTownScion]

Then again, I remember when I was probably four or five, I rode regularly with my parents on track trollys which I know haven't died out like in Frisco. I've have ridden in the Frisco Trollys and really a Frisco Trolly can't hold a candle to THE GREEN HORNET!!!!!!!!!!!!! in style, grace and speed. It's like comparing a VW to a Ferarri.

The PCC (Presidents’ Conference Committee) cars were developed in the 1930's as a standard design for the North America's streetcar lines. They thought that I was a madman when I landed in Toronto one late night in 1979 and rode them all night (instead of getting a hotel room like a sane man) while waiting for a morning train to Montreal.

 

[ChiTownScion]

Isn't there a collection of restored trolleys running on Market Street in SF?

Sure is. A purist can note the difference between their "Chicago car" and the real thing... but it's still a fun ride.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I looked it up and you are right. But tell me which one would you consider a "working trackless trolly" or a yuppy mobile?

View attachment 63996

Top pic is of a Marmon Herrington trolleybus on the #54 Cicero Avenue line crossing the ground level Douglas Park rapid transit line just north of Cermak Road (22nd Street). Easy to date, as the car behind it is a 1969 Ford Galaxie and the electric busses ceased operating in 1973 so, that's your time frame.

One of the advantages of the "yuppie mobiles" (at least some of them in Vancouver) is that they can run for a short distance on rechargeable batteries without the overhead: that's a big advantage when there's a temporary reroute due to a fire or such.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The PCC (Presidents’ Conference Committee) cars were developed in the 1930's as a standard design for the North America's streetcar lines. They thought that I was a madman when I landed in Toronto one late night in 1979 and rode them all night (instead of getting a hotel room like a sane man) while waiting for a morning train to Montreal.

Some of those are still running today on the Mattapan route of the Red Line in Boston.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Aah, now I saw, that Innsbruck gave the trolleybus finally up, in 2007.

Germany got still Eberswalde, Solingen and Esslingen am Neckar.

 

[ChiTownScion]

Came across this on YouTube: last streetcar service in Chicago, 1958. Green Hornet (PCC) car made the last run.. but there is some footage of the old "Red Rocket," mainly Pullman, streetcars in their pre- CTA Chicago Surface Lines paint scheme with a CTA sticker.

The cars ran well to the end, and the cars themselves actually required less maintenance than internal combustion (diesel and propane) buses.

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ Enjoyable video - thank you for posting.

Lizzie and others, anything thoughts on my earlier query, were the streetcars replaced by buses as part of some scam by the bus manufacturers / bus companies (which is what I used to believe, but ChiTownScion's early post made me question this) or were they really more economical to run and the right choice for the community?

 

[LizzieMaine]

It depends on the city. It's pretty well documented that auto industry collusion put an end to the trolley system in Los Angeles, and that the end of trolleys in Brooklyn in the 1950s was the result of Robert Moses' desire to stress high-traffic thruways as part of his auto-driven vision of the city's future.

Whether that goal was was a plot on the part of General Motors or just Moses' own philosophy or a combination of the two I'll leave to Robert Caro to decide, but I will note that GM was, with the expert help of the Boys, heavily, heavily promoting exactly the sort of projects Moses wanted to build as far back as the 1930s -- the "Futurama" exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair was a Moses fever dream come to life, with cars dominating transportation and no public transport in sight at all.

I'll also note that it's well documented that Moses received a $25,000 payoff from General Motors in 1953 for submitting the "winning entry" in a "Better Highways" essay contest. There are those cynical souls who suspect that "award" just might have been a quid-pro-quo for services rendered.

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ I wonder though if, despite the nefarious business and political motivations, the streetcars were doomed economical or not?

I love the light rail that's been popping up in many communities around the country, but in the spirit of honesty, these systems almost never seem to make sense on a cost-benefit analysis unless you bring in the hard-to-measure and squishy ideas of "improving the community" or "making the downtown, etc., more people friendly."

The cost to build and maintain these light rails far, far exceed the fairs collected from their ridership or the cost of running a bus route instead. I'm pretty confident, based on all I've read, that this is true for the modern light rail projects, what I'd love to know is if the original streetcars were truly uneconomical or just done away with for business / political interests.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Well, again, Los Angeles and Brooklyn are pretty strong testimony that outside forces were calling the shots, and not the public. The trolleys in Brooklyn, especially, weren't just a popular method of transportation, they were a fundamental part of the borough's identity. Note this Brooklyn trolley map from the late 1930s -- the solid lines are tracked trolleys, the dotted lines are trolley buses.

It challenges the imagination to assume that this system, as highly developed as it was, and as heavily used as it was, would lose its economic base in less than fifteen years unless forces other than economic factors were at work.

I've seen articles over the last couple of years suggesting that plans are afoot to bring trolleys back to Brooklyn, but I imagine that will happen around the same time the Dodgers come home.

 

[Trenchfriend]

I think, cities were never real friends of the trolley-busses and gave it up, as soon as they could. The trolley-busses combine the disadvantages of both systems, beeing dependent on a trolley-wire and on the other side, beeing hindered by the regular street-traffic.

As far as I know, the city of Weimar planned great things in 1991 and it's said, that new modern, western trolley-busses were already ordered and in delivery (!). But suddenly, the city decided to gave up the trolley-busses and started to buy new diesel-busses. The remaining trolley-system, with the hungarian Ikarus-busses, was allowed to run until 1993.

Market-economy, ...

Backround:
The trolley-busses of Weimar were a kid of the Soviet-Military-Administration in 1946.

 

[Stanley Doble]

There was a time when trolley cars and street railways were a profitable business. The profits began to fade away under competition from cars and buses in the 1920s. In a lot of areas the trolley system was owned by real estate developers as a way to get customers to buy houses in their outlying suburbs. This reason became less compelling as cars became more popular.

By the 1930s many trolley systems were running old, obsolete, worn out cars and couldn't afford to replace them. It was cheaper to scrap the whole system and replace with buses.

The trolley industry fought back with the PCC cars, a standardized design meant to be mass produced at a cheap enough price to compete with buses and give the public a more modern comfortable ride. They were quite successful and were used for 20, 30 years or more.

Today we could have electric buses quieter than the old trolleys, pollution free and at a price competitive with city buses. With today's batteries we would not need the spider web of overhead wires, and with good rubber tires we don't need the trolley tracks.

The next stage will be self driving buses and taxicabs. If we eliminate the driver it becomes possible to run larger numbers of smaller buses, making the system more efficient and convenient for the public. If you replace 1 50 passenger bus with 2 25 passenger buses, you can have a bus every 10 minutes instead of every 20 minutes, and can add extra buses very quickly when there is a demand for them.

New more efficient batteries and self driving vehicles will revolutionize public transport, if we can only get peoples thinking out of the 19th century and into the 21st century.

 

[tonyb]

There was a time when trolley cars and street railways were a profitable business. The profits began to fade away under competition from cars and buses in the 1920s. In a lot of areas the trolley system was owned by real estate developers as a way to get customers to buy houses in their outlying suburbs. This reason became less compelling as cars became more popular.

By the 1930s many trolley systems were running old, obsolete, worn out cars and couldn't afford to replace them. It was cheaper to scrap the whole system and replace with buses.

The trolley industry fought back with the PCC cars, a standardized design meant to be mass produced at a cheap enough price to compete with buses and give the public a more modern comfortable ride. They were quite successful and were used for 20, 30 years or more.

Today we could have electric buses quieter than the old trolleys, pollution free and at a price competitive with city buses. With today's batteries we would not need the spider web of overhead wires, and with good rubber tires we don't need the trolley tracks.

The next stage will be self driving buses and taxicabs. If we eliminate the driver it becomes possible to run larger numbers of smaller buses, making the system more efficient and convenient for the public. If you replace 1 50 passenger bus with 2 25 passenger buses, you can have a bus every 10 minutes instead of every 20 minutes, and can add extra buses very quickly when there is a demand for them.

New more efficient batteries and self driving vehicles will revolutionize public transport, if we can only get peoples thinking out of the 19th century and into the 21st century.

Just read yesterday that the City of Buffalo is no longer requiring a minimum number of off-street parking spaces in certain new developments--commercial, residential, etc. This is in recognition that the city is and will be less dependent on the personal vehicle. As you noted, self-driving vehicles have the potential for drastically changing our cityscapes. If you don't need your own car, you don't need your own parking space.

 

[BlueTrain]

The idea of streetcars, as they're called around here, isn't dead. Washington, DC, is experimenting with them but seems to be only making slow progress. The cars are being manufactured in the Czech Republic, which I guess is better than China, so I guess there are no American manufacturing in existence. Ridership is what is most important here.

There are parallels with the railroad industry here, both historically and at the present. Railroads were built with considerable government assistance for the most part and it was good policy. It seems like half the plots of old B-westerns were about someone having inside information about the railroad about to come through. The plots of the rest were about water (I exaggerate). Anyway, the growth in the use of private automobiles as well as busses and the whole trucking industry was facilitated by highway construction. In fact, the trucking industry was the main competitor of railroads for freight.

Railroads used to carry a lot of passenger traffic into the 1950s and the train station was a major establishment in almost all towns that were on the railroad lines. Those days are gone, though there is still some passenger traffic. We took the Auto train to Florida, which is a really nice way to get there, especially if you're going to Orlando or the Kennedy Space Center. The biggest disadvantage for half the riders, frankly, is that the northern terminal is just south of Washington, D.C., which means that riders from New York still have a long drive just to catch the train. Might as well fly and rent a car when you get there. But increased airline baggage fees make the decision a little easier.