This car is painted in tribute to Kansas City, which ran PCC streetcars from 1941 to 1957. Kansas City’s PCCs – 184 in all – were painted to emphasize their modern lines, with a black ‘swoosh’ on the sides to highlight the logo of Kansas City Public Service Company (KCPS), which featured Frederic Remington’s famed sculpture “The Scout” on a red heart.
This streetcar is painted to honor Cincinnati, which ran PCC streetcars from 1939 to 1951. Cincinnati was unique among North American streetcar systems in requiring two overhead wires for streetcars, one to supply electrical power, the other to provide a ground and complete the circuit. This arrangement grew from an early and (pardon the pun) groundless fear of electrocution from the standard streetcar practice of returning current through the tracks. (Trolley buses use two wires because they run on rubber tires, and have no metal tracks to use as ground.)
This streetcar is painted to honor Chicago, which ran PCC streetcars from 1936 to 1958. Chicago had the largest PCC fleet ever purchased new by one city–683 cars.
No U.S. city has had longer or more varied experience with PCC streetcars than Boston. From the delivery of its first streamliner in 1937 until the present day, PCCs have been a part of the Beantown scene. That single PCC was ordered by private operator Boston Elevated Railway Company (BERy) and was followed by 20 more in 1941. No. 1059 is painted in tribute to the BERy era of PCC operation in Boston.
This streetcar is an actual Philadelphia streetcar painted in that city’s original PCC livery, dating from 1938. Although Philadelphia Rapid Transit Co. (PRT) was the largest streetcar operator that was not a member of the coalition that designed the famous PCC streetcar, it was still an early buyer.
PCC streetcar interior. David Dugan photo.
The “Steel City”, as Pittsburgh has long been called, was also one of the great PCC streetcar cities as well. It operated the world’s first PCC carrying passengers, in August 1936. Its 666 PCCs were second in number to Chicago’s 683 among US operators. It operated PCCs until 1999, one of the longest tenures of any PCC operator.
This car is painted to honor Baltimore, which ran PCC streetcars from 1936 to 1963.
One of the first cities to operate PCCs, Baltimore began with an order of 27 in 1936. The privately owned operator, Baltimore Transit Company (BTC) subsequently placed seven additional orders for the streamliners, eventually acquiring 275 PCCs. They made up just over a quarter of BTC’s huge streetcar fleet, which also included a variety of old-fashioned cars and 150 lightweight high-speed Peter Witt cars ordered in 1930.
Another sordid Saturday morning on the F-line. Eleven a.m., Ferry Building, Wharf-bound. A mob of people waiting as Birmingham 1077 pulls up (see, some of those Newark streetcars DO run!). It’s already packed, but the operator squeezes a few more people in. Then he can’t get the rear doors closed because a passenger is standing on the door-opening treadle and apparently doesn’t understand English (a WHOLE lot of those folks, Europeans, on the line today).
The O’Farrell, Jones & Hyde line was the last complete cable car route built in San Francisco, opening in 1891. By rule, anytime a new cable car line crossed an existing one, the cable of the new line had to be routed beneath the older line’s cable.That meant that operators gripping the new line had to drop (“let go”) their cable at such crossings. The O’Farrell, Jones & Hyde line had 22 cable drops on a round trip. That’s why this 1901 poem by Gellet Burgess says “You are apt to earn your wages, on the Hyde Street Grip.”
