About 2 years ago I was in Worchester(?) Mass. I had to go to the local bus garage for something. The Trolley tracks were still in the floor of the garage eevn though they did not have trolleys for 60 years!.
Other towns that i can think of who Bus garages used to be Trolley barns are,
Burlington VT- Vermont transit(Now Greyhound) on Winooski used to be a trolley barn.
Akron OH–Moved 6 years ago to new garage next door
Woodhill Garage Cleveland OH
Not sure on Buffalo or Jamestown NY?
Any others?
Chicago Transit Authority’s Archer-Rockwell garage, although heavily rebuilt, was originally a carbarn for Chicago City Railway, a predecessor of Chicago Surface Lines. There may be other garages on CTA with a similar history.
Trolley Square in Salt Lake City is a shopping center development that used to be a trolley barn. Only the basic shell remains the same as it has been massively rebuilt.
In Cincinnati, the trolley barns at Spring Grove Ave & Ludlow are now warehouses & Furniture stores. Colorado Springs is a furniture store. Denver’s horsecar barns are commercial businesses & restaurants and the Denver Tramway powerhouse is now a wilderness outfitter’s flagship store.
Milwaukee, WI we have facilities that were car barns. Some of us still cal them carbarns! I checked some plans for resurfacing the bus stalls in the garages and they were labeled “tracks”!
Minneapolis and St Paul lost their streetcars in 1954, but for many years at least 2 of the car barns served on as bus garages.
The Lake Street barn/garage in Minneapolis, and the Snelling Avenue in St Paul are the ones I remember. Snelling was actually a part of a much larger complex where the Twin City Lines built most of the streetcars they ever used, including cars that they built for other cities. The shops were torn down, and the land is now a small mall. The car barn which sat on the southwest corner of the property remained in use as a bus garage and office until just a couple of years ago, when it too was torn down. Now it appears to be something of a bus graveyard, with a mix of old buses rusting outside for all to see.
I haven’t been to Minneapolis in so long, I don’t know the fate of the Lake Street facility. It was still there last time I looked.
Ah yes, the powerhouse!!! Once the Forney Museum, and home to the locomotive from which I took my screen name, now REI. I spent many Friday nights there in the early 80’s, shoveling dirt and rubble, and doing general construction, all in the name of building a model railroad. Another forum member, who shall remain nameless, was actually the mastermind of the project.
Remember the night Skippy jackhammered his toe? Inside joke for the mystery man.[swg]
Transit barns {Streetcar & Interurban}…Muncie, In. Since has been used in Manufacturing and maybe warehousing…
Street Cars stopped in: 1931 - Interurbans in: 1941
Anderson, In. streecar barns…Some commercial use since but not sure what.
Salem street in Summerville, MA, is a bus garage that used to be a streetcar barn used by both Boston Eevated and the Eastern Massachusetts Street Railway, the latter for the through service from the Sullivan Sq. El Station to Stonham. I think the Watertown bus garage was the streetcar barn there, serving the through line to the Park Street Subway, and the lines to Harvard Sq and to Central Sq
Avon Lake, Ohio. The main buildings in the Avon Lake shopping center are trolley barns. If you look off to the west, across the power company property ,you can still see right-of-way grading…and the town has an Electric Avenue which, I understand, used to be the high speed interurban main line.
In Colorado Springs there is an old Roundhouse that belonged to Rock Island and older roads before that that is not a Pottery place and the tracks are still in the ground, that whole area of town has tracks buried beneath the streets…POTTERY???
Here in Baltimore the MTAs main bus shop used to be the Baltimore Traction Co. Carrol Park Shops and Carbarns.
This complex is huge! It takes up a whole city block or two.
Most of the buildings are still used going by photos I have seen.
My Grandfather used to work for the BTC working in the overhead trolley lines.
Clevelands Harvard DOT gararges used to be trolley barns…Now they take care of the citys streets. Problem was with a lot of trolley companys is that they were forced to take of there streets that they ran on including snow plowing.
…in Cambridge, MA! When I lived there in the early 70s, the buses had an underground terminal at Harvard Sq., and one of the approach ramps still had rails in the pavement.
Further east, on Mass Ave. east of Central Sq., there was a “wye” in the street at one of the intersections.
Meanwhile, in SoCal, the bus depot at Pico and Rimpau was a Los Angeles Transit Lines (yellow car) terminal, and in the early 80s you could still see paved-over rails there. I revisited the site a few years ago and you can’t really see the rails anymore (but the platform configuration is still “trolley-ish”.