Don't Talk to the Motorman
by Bob Brooke

“Don’t Talk to the Motorman,” said the sign at the front of every trolley. This plus the clang of the bell, the grind of traction motors and the clatter of wheels as they rolled over staggered rail joints and through the complicated switch and crossing work prevailing at many intersections endeared the trolley to several generations of riders.

During the great years of the era, the trolley car was to the average family what the automobile and the station wagon are today. It carried the head of the household between home and work six days of the week. Husband and wife rode it downtown every Saturday afternoon on the weekly shopping tour. The whole family rode it to church Sunday morning.

People used the trolley to visit relatives or just to go for a ride. Children, particularly those in rural areas, rode the trolley to school; and most companies sold weekly school passes good for a certain number of rides at a substantial saving in fare. Dad took the trolley to the ball park. Sunday school classes went on trolley car picnics. Businesses held an annual trolley car outing for their employees.

And, of course, the deceased went on that final ride to the cemetery aboard one. By today's standards it was slow, but in its time and place it provided a useful service and performed its job with amazing convenience and economy.

By the turn of the century more than 30,000 trolleys glided along15,000 miles of electrified track in the U.S. Between 1890 and the start of World War I, U.S. cities and their network of electric railways both expanded at an astonishing rate. So many trolley lines wound through the streets of Brooklyn that the local baseball team became known as the Trolley Dodgers, later shortened to Dodgers.

THE EARLY YEARS
No one person invented the trolley. Rebuilt from horsecars, the earliest electrics were uncertain vehicles. The impetus for power came after a flu killed many horses, halting service.

Some inventors mounted the motor on the front platform, so that nothing was more natural than to christen the electrician standing beside it a "motorman." The first electric cars were unreliable, creating hissing phone lines, bursting water and gas pipes, and electrocuting cats and dogs. But since flimsy horsecar platforms showed a tendency to shake to pieces under this load, they soon moved the motor down near the wheels. Speeds were low, perhaps eight or nine miles an hour when all went well.

A man named Leo Daft invented a system employing two overhead wires, strung side by side, on which there ran a toy-sized cart or dolly known as a “troller” or trolley. Flexible wires dangled from the dolly to the car beneath, which towed it along. However, the Daft system proved troublesome since the troller kept falling off the wire and landing with a terrifying crash on the car roof. Consequently, Daft cars tended to leak in heavy rains causing passengers to keep their umbrellas raised inside.

Daft used crude fuses to save the motors from overloading, but these fuses could let go with a brilliant yellow flash and a deafening bang, sending passengers out through the windows.

Word got around about how trolleys "forced electricity into the ground," subjecting water pipes to a destructive corrosion called electrolysis. It was also widely rumored that the blue sparks flashing from trolley poles were injurious to eyesight.

Despite tremendous difficulties, a young Annapolis graduate named Frank Sprague built a 12-mile, 40-car line in Richmond, Virginia, which began service on February 2nd, 1888. Since both its size and survival were unprecedented, it quickly attracted the attention of horsecar officials all over North America. Soon, scores of similar lines appeared signaling the birth of the electric traction era.

Sprague used and improved the now familiar trolley pole instead of the 'troller' for power collection and designed a mounting for the motors that kept the gearing between them and the road wheels in constant mesh. He also showed that reversing the motors would slow the cars and bring them to a halt safely. Sprague connected his trolley pole to a fold-down mechanism for passing under bridges or through tunnels.

Street railway patronage set new records every month, and cars grew in size in order to accommodate the riders.

As the four-wheel, single-truck car reached its longest, practical length, manufacturers developed a double-truck, eight-wheel car, almost twice the length of the single-truck vehicle.
These larger cars weren’t only a boon to the heavily trafficked lines, they were faster and performed better on the open-track work prevailing on the suburban routes than on the paved city streets.

In the beginning, the cities needed electric traction transportation. Just moving the masses of urban dwellers between home and work severely taxed the existing horse and cable car systems, because both methods of propulsion imposed strict limitations on the weight and size of the individual passenger vehicle as well as on its speed of operation.

Neither method of propulsion offered even token promise for solving the gigantic transportation problem that was looming inevitably in urban areas. The sudden and unexpected perfection of a workable and economically feasible electric trolley came just in the nick of time. As the industry rapidly grew and matured, the trolley became part of the fabric of everyday life.

On most lines, even in the smaller cities, car came along every few minutes. On busier routes and in the larger cities one always seemed to be in sight. During the morning and evening rush hours, headways, the interval of time between cars, were measured in inches than in minutes, for companies pressed every car capable of turning a wheel into service to cope with the peak loads.

Small towns built systems as short as a mile in length. And big cities built systems with hundreds of miles of track. Suburbs grew up all around larger cities because of reliable, all-weather trolley transportation. Trolleys were everywhere and took people everywhere they wanted to go.

At first, a different company owned almost every line. So passengers paid an additional fare each time they changed cars. Around the turn of the century, a wave of consolidation swept most cities with just one or two big streetcar companies owning all the routes. These companies soon discovered that by issuing free transfers between lines, more than enough additional riders would take the cars to make up for the fares lost. Ridership soared.

TROLLEY RIDERS
The first trolley riders exhibited a noticeable air of bravado. Men would hand their pocket watches to their stay-behind womenfolk because the powerful electric currents flowing invisibly about a car might magnetize them.

Some riders joked about how in 1888 New York State had decided to electrocute murderers. Riders believed it prudent to disembark hastily if a thunderstorm sprang up. On some lines it was a regular practice to stop and pull-down trolley poles whenever thunder rumbled nearby.

Scarcely more than a decade after streetcar owners coaxed the first cautious riders aboard the infant sparkers, real estate values soared near the lines. When buying a house, people gave thought to whether it was within easy walking distance of a trolley line.

On most small trolley lines, an endearing tradition of informality existed, very different from the bleak impersonal feeling of big railroads. When a regular rider didn't make it to the stop on time in the morning, the motorman would dally while he or she came puffing up. The daytime conductor could be bribed into delivering a parcel to a house several blocks away or into dropping a letter in the slot at the depot by a gift of some oven-fresh muffins.

People could time the events of their domestic lives by the trolley's regularity. A wife knew by the screech of the wheels on the curve down the street at 5:45 PM that her husband was on his way home from work.

Some conductors developed delusions that a disproportionate number of men carrying bass violins, two-man saws, rolls of barbed wire, and kegs of fish fertilizer attempted to board their cars. When they succeeded, it always seemed to develop that fat women would lurch crunchingly against the bass viols, or that fragile, jury-appealing people would wound themselves on wire or saw. Or that a grandmother would take one whiff of the fish barrel and swoon at a lawyer's feet, developing lower-back pain as she fell.

Ejection of unruly or nonpaying passengers proved to be a sore point on most lines. According to the Motorman’s Handbook, ”No passenger shall be forcibly ejected from a car for any cause whatsoever, unless the conduct of the passenger is dangerous and grossly offensive.

No passenger will be ejected for mere intoxication, unless said passenger becomes dangerous or offensive; such passenger must then be ejected with great care, and must be guided until free from probable injury. No passenger shall be put off at a. point where likely to be exposed to danger.” Law suits were an everyday fact of life for streetcar companies.

SPECIAL TROLLEYS
From the earliest days on, open cars were the summertime favorites of the trolley-riding public. Inherited from the horse and cable systems, it became increasingly unpopular with railway managements; and after a few years most companies wished it never had been invented.

Companies with open cars had to maintain two sets of equipment--one for summer, one for winter. Furthermore, their basic construction, which involved long transverse benches without a center aisle, presented a problem of fare collection. Their seating capacity was tremendous; but companies always said receipts rarely matched capacity, even during the height of the summer season.

In addition to the usual roster of open and closed passenger cars, the typical street railway company owned a variety of specialized cars. Originally intended for use by company officials on inspection trips, parlor trolleys appeared quite widely in the 1890s.

Generally luxurious, parlor-car trolleys gleamed with brass fittings, richly curtained windows, wall-to-wall carpeting, decorated ceilings, polished mahogany paneling, and colored glass in the clerestory. The directors of the Connecticut Traction Company could avail themselves in their car of a lavatory that was shielded from common gaze by stained glass windows of almost paralyzing elegance.

In St. Louis, the private car Mabel not only had special lockers for china, glassware, and linen, but also an icebox, sink, built-in desk, rich portieres opalescent glass, and an overstuffed loveseat.

In Manchester, New Hampshire, the directors' car had enough fancy scrolled ironwork for a New Orleans building front. In Denver a parlor car had a "tasteful ceiling of Paris green, with dark green border ornamented in gold." This one also offered 16 rattan easy chairs, 8 glittering spittoons, and mother-of-pearl call buttons with which a faint director could summon refreshment to his easy chair.

Even though originally built to enhance self esteem of officials, these deluxe trolleys soon found additional service on charter trips. Many a citizen would willingly plunk down $20 or $30 on spare-no-expense occasions such as weddings or anniversaries so that he or she could glide elegantly through the streets in publicly displayed privacy. Other parlor-car occasions included fraternal affairs, bachelor dinners, and special sightseeing tours for visiting dignitaries.

Often, too, people chartered them for funerals. Many companies in the larger cities had cars especially built for the purpose. Frequently named instead of numbered, these cars provided a special casket compartment up front with plate glass windows and a large glass door that allowed the coffin to be viewed from the street; a nickel-plated rail against which flowers could be banked; 8 black leather seats in the casket compartment for first-degree mourners, and 24 seats in the rear for lesser grievers.

Smaller or less affluent lines used an ordinary combine car with the usual baggage compartment at one end to hold the casket, and a passenger section occupying the remaining two-thirds of the car for those attending the funeral. Companies charged a moderate $20-26 for all these somber but choice conveniences, a fee that included the services of a neatly dressed motorman and conductor.

Postal cars operated on many of the larger systems. Painted red, white and blue, these colorful cars ran over established routes on specific schedules, picking up mail from corner boxes and transporting it to the main post office. Like the familiar Railway Post Office cars, until recently an inseparable part of every respectable passenger train, the Post Office equipped the trolley versions with a mail slot on each side in which letters could be deposited by the sender.

Electric traction, as the industry was known, reached its physical peak during World
War I. Following that period, a gradual decline in the numbers of route miles of track and cars operated began to appear. At first, the decline was barely perceptible--here and there a small company tore up its rails and pulled down its overhead wires. But mostly these were small, marginal operations that never should have been built in the first place.

Actually, trolley patronage continued to grow for another six years, until 1923, when 14 billion riders paid to ride the streetcars of the U.S. At the same time, the faster interurban cars began to take over the former suburban routes.

As trolley companies began to shut down, they abandoned their trolleys. Enterprising people put these retired trolleys to other uses, including roadside restaurants, chicken coups, even a church.

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