This car is painted in the livery of Los Angeles Transit Lines (LATL), which operated PCC streetcars after World War II.

Los Angeles Railways (whose 1937 PCC livery is worn by Muni No. 1052) sold out in 1945 to National City Lines (NCL), infamous for buying up streetcar lines and converting them to buses.

Operating in LA as Los Angeles Transit Lines, National City Lines bought more streetcars, 40 extra-wide PCCs of this body style in 1948, to modernize the Pico line, where patronage was too heavy for buses.

The new Pico line streetcars were painted in the standard NCL paint scheme modeled on this car. NCL streetcars in other cities, such as El Paso, wore nearly identical liveries (Muni’s No. 1073 wears a later El Paso livery). If the East Bay’s Key System had gone ahead with a potential PCC purchase, you would have seen this livery in Oakland, too.

Massive freeway construction in the 1950s and the resulting suburban sprawl stole riders from both LATL and its interurban counterpart Pacific Electric.

The publicly owned Metropolitan Transit Authority took over LATL and repainted its PCCs in a handsome two-tone green and white livery, but it only lasted a few years. Despite daily Pico line ridership of 40,000, twice what the crowded F-line handles, PCCs disappeared from Los Angeles in 1963 and automobile domination of the southland was complete.

But now, rail is undergoing a modest renaissance in Los Angeles, with both heavy-rail subway and light rail lines slowly spreading across the region — still a pale shadow of the streetcar systems that once were, but a new beginning neverthless.

» Los Angeles Railways No. 1052
» Pacific Electric No. 1061