Streetcar Nostalgia

Every now and then, I like to blog nostalgic. For this blog, it means that I start to talk about my early memories of railroads, streetcars, and the Chicago ‘L’. If at all possible, I try to tie these memories in with what’s going on in railroads in America today.

As I have said before in this blog, I like anything with flanged wheels that runs on rails. Even though I call this blog U.S. Railroad, etc., it’s my blog, and I say that streetcars qualify as railroads. My childhood streetcars were either red and crème or blue and off-white, living as I did in a close-in, western suburb of Chicago. These were the colors of the red cars still plying the Chicago streets under wire for the transit authority formed the year of my birth, and of the fast-dying blues of West Towns. By the time of my first recollections, the latter had been almost completely supplanted by blue buses, leaving only the tracks in the street, offset from asphalt, and highlighted by, paving bricks, that told me where the blue cars had gone. The growing volume of digitally archived, online color slides of these streetcars reinforces and confirms my decades-old memories.

The red cars rumbled a bit down the street; but nothing like some of the noisy freeway traffic we endure today. They otherwise hummed and made grinding noises owing to all electric drive and mechanical gearing in their traction equipment. Zinging noises in the overhead wires always signaled the approach and followed the departure of these streetcars. These were all-electric vehicles, environmentally friendly, though, in Chicago, at least, the electricity was produced by coal-fired power plants. The skies in Chicago in the 1950s were often grey from haze and even many residences still burned coal for heat. Many of the aforementioned digitized slides also confirm this memory.

So what’s this got to do with today? Well, it’s because there’s a streetcar revolution out there. Doing a brief online review, I found eleven new, modern streetcar projects underway and 35—count ‘em, 35—projects or extensions in the works, with the latest data available being about ten months old. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of these didn’t make it to completion, but other new ones wouldn’t surprise me, either.

Alas, Chicago made, in my opinion, a bad decision to move to smelly butane buses (we call the fuel LPG now) and pave over most streetcar lines. Chicago is not currently one of the cities with a project under consideration. If you make a bad decision, it’s politically better to stick to it. Pity, since there are likely very few current residents who even remember the red cars as I do. (By the way, there were also green and crème PCC streetcars, some of which later got converted to ‘L’ cars. I have no recollection of riding them as streetcars. Also note that there are some grassroots efforts going on to bring back at least one Northside streetcar line.)

In political fashion similar to Chicago, my current home town of Albuquerque, New Mexico, isn’t doing streetcars despite once having yellow and red-striped cars running in the downtown area. Though a streetcar project has been touted off and on for the past 2 decades, the current boondoggle is something called (ugh) Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). All the trappings of streetcars and none of the joy of railroading. Just the joy of federal funding. The BRT buses just run on dedicated rights of way. Maybe they’ll at least be electric, or at least hybrid.

I get it that everything old is new for those who aren’t very old. I also get it that those who made the decisions to dismantle streetcar lines in the 1930s, 40s and 50s did not know what a mess fossil fuels would become, or that electric traction would again become popular both because of modernity and energy efficiency. Chicago decided to off the cars because somebody made a good deal with General Motors. I don’t know why Albuquerque abandoned them. Like all forms of passenger rail, electric streetcars do not promise to pay for themselves out of fare box revenue without some fancy accounting.

Next week I’ll switch from nostalgia to fantasy, as I tell Albuquerque what I think the city should do instead of BRT (aka ART for Albuquerque Rapid Transit), and it ain’t streetcars.

© 2016 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com

(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Charles is a political conservative but believes in public funding of passenger rail as a part of the federal government’s constitutionally conservative obligation to provide for defense and public infrastructure so that private enterprise may flourish.)