For instance Cleveland Railways had to remove snow fix potholes and on top of that pay a franchise fee and pay for use of public power poles. When they went to buses those responsibilities went away. CLEVELAND RAILWAYS was not bought out by National City Lines but mini policy forced them to bustition
municipal policy
source Harry Christianson Cleveland Streetcar Memories Vol 1 Cleveland Public Library
Those terms were pretty common for franchise agreements involving street railways, but the terms did not take into account competition to street railways getting a free ride.
Note utilities (phone, power, gas, cable TV, etc) also involve franchise agreements, but not typically with the harsh consequences that street railway’s franchise agreements.
And, who got stuck with the bill for having to rip up all that track once the streetcar companies were kaput? That’s one aspect most “Harvey Hustlebucks” seem to lose sight of when they are making their “we have an opportunity for commerce here, why are all you people so opposed to progress ?” sales pitches. Who get’s left holding the bag after all the quick bucks have been milked out of it?
In some cases the streetcar tracks were simply paved over and forgotten, only to be rediscovered decades later.
The ‘quick bucks’ often went to the politicians who could arrange soaking the big bad transit monopoly for their free street cleaning, snow removal, road improvements, etc. – and impose franchise and other taxes and fees, require low fares, get special passes, etc.
And few people seem to have made the connection that more reliable automobiles also implies more reliable used automobiles. The first place I see it explicitly discussed is in Middletown (which was 1925); it was three ‘sales generations’ deep by then… less than a decade later, Okies were bankrupt but… they could get their families and possessions to California…
The traction company had the stranded cost not only of all the track and its maintenance, but the overhead wiring and its power. Not surprising that Insull tried to make it a synergistic part of ‘electricity as a pervasive service’ – something he succeeded at well enough to have the New Yorkers scheme to take it all away.
It can be surprising how fast ‘huge market share’ can wither and disappear – a recent example being BlackBerry. None of the civic free ride ever seems to be willingly relieved once the company goes upside down. At least none of the municipalities seems to have thought to require full decommissioning costs (adjusted for cost inflation, of course) in escrow…
Quite true, I’ve got a piece of one.
And sometimes the ghosts of those long-gone trolleys get their revenge! Some crumbling pavement up in New Jersey exposed the end of an old Public Service trolley rail, which ripped up a tire on a Jersey Transit bus!
While not streetcar rail. In the lead up to construction of Harbor Place in Baltimore in the late 1970’s. After the B&O had stopped serving customers on Pratt Street from the track that was in the middle of the street - just like streetcar tracks - one morning during ‘rush hour’, somehow a rail was broken out of the rail structure and kicked up ‘teeter-totter’ style into and through a vehicle, killing the driver.
That incident then expedited the removal of all the rail that was in Pratt Street and the leads to each of the multiple industries that were served by the Pratt Street yard job. Additionally there was a yard job out of Locust Point Yard that operated in the street down Key Highway onto Light Street and then on to Pratt Street down to President Street. In the wee hours of the AM it was not unusual to see two B&O yard engines servicing customers on Pratt Street at the same time.
I recall my first exposure to “trolleys” was as a very young child in the early 1960’s, seeing relic rails working their way up through the pavement on local streets, and wondering why such a great idea was not still the norm.
My parents were decidedly glad to have put them in the past, and would scoff and scorn at any mention I might make wishing for their return.
Only years later via photoalbums in our local library did I get a first hand view of their halcyon era. Catenary was quite a mess.
Someone even bothered to assemble a latter day album, in detail, of the ordeal involved in removing the lines paved over prior. Many of the involved streets had originally been paved in bricks, back in the trolley era, and then later asphalted over in it’s entirety.
It was all quite interesting, in an “ashes to ashes” sort of way.
A very interesting story, for sure. But if I remember correctly, also an opportuity ripe for scheming, shifting infrastructure costs to the electric consumers. (Wheeler-Rayburn, etc)
Wasn’t Insull also involved in some real estate - chiefly to create business for his lines?
Actually the reverse build the lines to sell homes and land along the track like Brightline is doing today…passenget rail loses money but real estate developments make money. Nowadays gov builds the connections for developers
There was infinitely more profit for him in the real-estate developments – not in the obvious sense of land value appreciation or builder’s profits or PUD commercial possibilities, but in the added demand for domestic electricity service and appliances. Individually, regionally, and using the ‘feeder’ infrastructure to reach new regions.
There was no question that real-estate development has played a major role. Perhaps the most pointed example was the actual building of the West Side elevated railroads in New York City. My impression was that most of the ‘traction-related’ improvements were things calculated to bring in more nickels, at relatively low capital expenditure or prequal risk – amusement parks and resorts at one end of the line being a common example.
We shouldn’t leave the fascinating-to-me example of Roadtown out of this discussion. Back in the era before all the Italian Futurists died, there were classically American projects to optimize development around interurban railroads when full highways as opposed to ‘good roads’ were still in their infancy. As early as 1910 there were well-described plans for linear development – a kind of massive PUD around what became the classic commercial highway strips several decades later.
The Van Sweringens did just that, using their trolley lines to lure buyers for their Shaker Heights real estate.
(Overmod) “Less than a decade later, Okies were bankrupt but…they could get their families and possessions to California…”
Will Rogers said (1928): “We hold the distinction of being the only nation in the history of the world to go to the poorhouse in an automobile.”
As I recall the tale, Oris and Mantis got into the whole railroad business initially because it was cheaper to gain control of a whole railroad than to negotiate with the railroad for added service to one of their developments… or to build new even as cheaply as traction could make possible…
Likewise in 1928, Hoover claimed his party’s policies would give a chicken for every pot… and a car in every backyard – this later morphed into the more famous version.
I guess they failed to anticipate the dynamics of the Cypress Viaduct?
I moved to the Oakland area in August 1989. And remember thinking as I drove through that thing that I wouldn’t want to be inside that thing during an earthquake. And just months later, my concerns proved prophetic. I was both awed as well as dumbfounded. Lot to be said for coincidence, I guess?
That’s who I was thinking of.
On the flip side, one reason Edison was so fascinated by the book was that the structure was easily made in reinforced concrete, with many of the structural details of mushroom-headed construction. It could be argued that the design lessons in the Imperial Hotel framing, notably the footing designs, could have been adapted to development not long after WWI. It would not be difficult to account for much seismic and weather risk – perhaps enough to make large parts of this sort of linear PUD suitable even for tornado shelter.
I was involved in test construction of houses for Habitat for Humanity in the early Nineties, assessing the AVG approach to sprayed-concrete construction. As you might suspect this involved somewhat less than Fermi I levels of fabrication care and expertise. Not that long later Hurricane Andrew came right across the site – eye less than 5 miles as I recall. All five houses suffered only minor damage, mostly via debris from most of the neighborhood blowing down around them…
The much more critical argument is what happens to large heavily-built infrastructure when it becomes obsolescent. This is an extreme case of the sort of fate awaiting the Sam Rea Line of the PRR, had it been built out with Cassatt-style monumental construction and 1923-era electrification, or the Ramsey-survey high-speed Gould railroad from Pittsburgh to northern New Jersey, proposed in detail by 1906 and again by 1930, and probably only not built due to the financing issues of 1907 and 1999. Much of the housing would be locked into the details of its era, particularly with respect to interior plans and genset ration dictated by early-29th-Century norms. That would include substantial acceptance of structural framing – no knocking out walls to enlarge the kitchen, or putting in or repairing wiring or plumbing or ducting. Remember that air-conditioning was The Machine Stops science fiction in that age.
Any sort of hotels would
One thing about the removal of the street car tracks is that in at least one location, Dayton, Ohio, the tracks had to stay in on some of the routes after the streetcars were discontined (last streetcar route in Dayton was in 1947). Dayton replaced many of the streetcar lines with trackless trolleys. Some of the routes still exist. Up until around the 1960’s and 70’s (and maybe later I’m not sure how the electrical system works today) the streetcar rails had to serve as the return ground for the trackless trolley electrical system on many of the routes. I know that the Main Street route did not, as a WPA project had done a project where the rails were replaced by a pole line. On the routes that still needed the rail in place, occasionally the power supply was interrupted when a mistake in excavation or the excavating crew did not realize that the rails were still in use resulted in the rail being cut. I think there are five Dayton trackless trolley lines that still see some daily or occasional use and as I wrote, I’m not sure if the present day electrical system still requires the use of any old rail. So as SD70Dude wrote, the tracks, at least in Dayton’s case, were paved over and forgotten by most, but sometimes rediscovered when they were mistakenly severed. I don’t know how the few other cities that kept their trackless trolleys contructed their electrical systems and whether or not they had the same occasional problems as occurred in Dayton.