When I lived near Richmond, VA this made my blood boil. Richmond had the first widespread and practical streetcar network in a huge network that even connected nascent resort towns and proto-suburbs to the main city network. It's recognized as an engineering milestone and several cities, notably Boston's previously mentioned network in this thread, based their lines on Richmond's. They dismantled it in the late 40s and burned all the trolleys in the street in some bizarre spectacle celebrating the birth of a supposedly more modern bus network. Today, instead of the world-class trendsetting public transit network of the past, Richmond has a poorly functioning bus network that barely leaves the incorporated city limits and a joke of a carpool finding service. To top it off Richmond has tossed around the idea of a multi-million dollar light rail system that essentially duplicates the old trolley lines they ripped up half a century ago. I'm sure everyone in the United States has a similar tale.
Richmond had a very practical system and probably developed around the same time as Boston's did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Boston's network is actually made up of multiple systems and is now the consolidation of the routes that belonged to the Eastern Massachusetts Street Railway, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and the Boston Elevated. The lines grew up, just like the railroads did, from the center, or Hub as they refer to Boston as today. Many of the outlying districts, such as Dorchester, Brookline, Roxbury, Needham, and Hyde Park, were developed by the street car companies. These areas were known as the streetcar suburbs. The wealthier merchants moved outside the noisy downtown area and out to the suburbs, and used to commute to work on the trolleys and EL.
Today the EL is gone, having been dismantled in the 1970s and 1980s as the line was moved to the former B&M and NH ROWs - the tracks share the ROW with these respective former railroads and then split off on their own branches and into tunnels. The north from Government Center to Revere running Blue line was once the ROW of the Boston Revere Beach and Lynn. In the early 1950s, what was left of the ROW was converted from narrow gauge to standard gauge. Interestingly they kept the catenary instead of using third rail beyond Logan Airport. The Red line was known as the Cambridge Subway and opened up about 1908. It's one of the largest, tunnel-size, and runs some of the longest subway cars. The trolley bus system in Cambridge is all that's left of that system which was instituted to replace the street cars out of Harvard Square. This line used GM and Mack buses initially. There are samples of these still up running up at the Seashore Trolley Museum. What is left of the extensive trolley system is the main core of a few branches plus the tunnels. The Tremont Street tunnel was one of the lines cut, and this occurred right at the end before the head of the authority was sent to prison for taking bribes. Sadly the lines out to Blue Hill Avenue, via Dudley Street, South Boston, Watertown via Harvard, and many, many other branches disappeared before the damage was done.
Now after removing the tracks, and scrapping the line from Cambridge (Lechmere) to Somerville and Medford, the MBTA is in the process of rebuilding a branch again at the tune of many millions of tax payer's dollars. If they had left the system in place, the investment would have been only to keep the lines running instead of starting over again.
John
