That's a new book by Russ Banham and the subtitle is A Struggle for a Great American County. It is published by George Mason University Press. Excerpt:
Among the incorporated towns was Falls Church, which claimed 1,100 citizens and an excellent connection to Washington, D.C., via the Washington, Arlington, and Falls Church Electric Railway. Electric trolley lines also connected commuters from the towns of Fairfax, Herndon, Vienna, and Clifton to the District.
That was in 1907. Does anyone know how fast these electric trolleys were? This source suggests speeds were up to 20 mph. Is it possible that a mass transit trip from Fairfax or Clifton to DC was quicker in 1907 than today? With stops, how fast does a bus go at 8:30 a.m.?
The 1916 and 1917 Rand, McNally Washington guides report that the trolleys took one hour to Mount Vernon and 45 minutes to Great Falls Park. Interestingly, the latter can no longer be reached by public transportation at all.
The lines were different, but the trip from Fairfax to DC probably took 45-60 minutes too.
Trolleys could go up to 90 mph on a private (no contention with cars) right of way with straight znd level track. The technology is quite speedy. How fast wer the trolleys serving Fairfax? You’d have to do some research to find a schedule.
Trolleys (or “electrics” as they were popularly called) were even better than you think: it was possible to do intercity travel via the network of electrics.
Of course it would take much longer than by ordinary train, and you might have to do some walking to get from the end of the line of one network to the end of the line of the next…but I remember reading that it was possible at one time to travel from north of Boston to Milwaukee using nothing but electrics.
This was not dissimilar to the ability one now has–limited to the Northeast Corridor, alas–of traveling from Fredericksburg, VA to the northern suburbs of Boston using nothing but commuter rail (except for the 20 miles between Perryville, MD and Newark, DE, where you’d have to use AMTRAK).
Allow me to echo David’s comment. New York City’s subways moved faster — and had greater capacity — when they opened before 1910 than they do today. The same is true of the PATH subway system, which opened in 1908. Commuter rails around the New York City area, likewise, moved far faster when they were first electrified (just before WWI) than they do today. Worse, despite a century’s worth of improving construction technology, both the time and (inflation-adjusted) money needed to build public transportation have skyrocketed. The numbers in that second link are shocking and I think your more libertarian readers will think them a pretty good indicator of just how badly government performs. It’s hard to think of anything controlled by the private sector that has gotten that much worse and that much more expensive in a century.
The only thing that made a noticeable change in the speed of moving about London over the last century (other than the temporary disturbances of war) was the congestion charge they intorduced there to reduce the nimber of vehicles in the center.
Sidebar: There was a trolley line that ran from Mt Vernon to Alexandria. The right of way ran in front of my boyhood home, although by that time (1960s) there wasn’t much evidence it was ever there. I’d find spikes in the dirt road, and the path to school I followed was along more of the old right of way. That’s still in evidence today.
A variety on that conspiracy theory exists everywhere. There’s some pretty good evidence against it– at least, evidence that demonstrates that electric trolleys became more and more unprofitable and were abandoned in cities where GM owned bus companies were not involved at all.
Another thing of note is that most of the early electric trolleys were owned by electric companies. Often they would sell electricity to their unregulated trolley company at a cut rate from their regulated electric company. Most of the utility regulations allowed companies to charge enough to make a “reasonable” profit, so this sort of cost-shifting was pretty effective.
The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, among its provisions, forbade holding companies that owned regulated utilities from owning unregulated companies, leading to the divestiture of most trolley companies from the utility holding companies.
Liam and John, the conspiracy theory is true, they were found guilty, and were fined $1. The decision is misused by leftists. The conspiracy wasn’t to destroy the trolleys. They were being killed by the automobile. The conspiracy was to get the trolley lines to buy GM, Goodyear, and Standard Oil instead of the competition. The way they implemented their little plan was to find struggling trolley lines, buy them up at their currently-assessed value (which was far in excess of their market value), and convert them to GM buses, Goodyear tires, and Standard Oil products.
John, your history is a little off. Trolley lines came before electric companies, so they often had their own generation and transmission facility. They came to be more valuable than the trolley itself. And as capitalists always want a franchise, they turned themselves into electric companies, and got themselves regulated (as B’rer Rabbit said “Throw me in the briar patch!” Regulate me!) to eliminate competition.
If you’re looking for old trolley tracks, you’ll often find them under power line ROW. E.g. north of Syracuse, NY on the west side of I-81.
How does that disagree with what I wrote? I did not deny that GM owned bus companies bought the trolley systems in some cities, and in some cases used chicanery to win the contracts over other suitors; it’s just the conspiracy theory that this killed the trolley systems is untrue, as you note. If you say that “the conspiracy theory is true,” people are going to assume that you mean “GM killed the trolleys,” not “the trolleys were doomed anyway, but GM (and associates) bribed councilmen in many cities in order to win the contracts for the buses that would inevitably replace trolleys.”
Yes I agree that in many cases trolley companies came first and then started selling electricity to others later rather than the other way around, but how does that disagree with what I wrote? Perhaps I should have said, “most early trolley companies were owned by the same electric utility holding companies that owned the power companies, regardless of which came first.” It did happen both ways– Duke Power Company operated trolleys, but was a power company before it had trolleys.
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