Trolley Thursday 7/30/20 - Guest Piece - Milwaukee Streetcars by Jonathan Lee

Welcome to the last Trolley post of July! As is tradition now with our transit experts of the month, we delegate onto them a guest post to write and have them impart their knowledge directly onto you, the unwilling captive and interested audience. For this month, our expert, Jonathan Lee, has written for you a concise history on the city of Milwaukee's interurban and streetcar operations. There's a lot to be said, but from us here at Twice Weekly Trolley History, thank you for reading our material, for giving us the biggest readership we've ever seen, and we hope you all stick around for more in the future. Mr. Lee, you have the floor!

(Also all photos today are credited to Joseph Canfield, author of "TM, The Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light Company," unless otherwise noted. Find the book link in the epilogue.)

Trolley Tuesday 7/28/20 - The Pullman Company's Streetcars

Even if you're not into railroads, the name "Pullman" is synonymous to luxury. Indeed, one of the many things George M. Pullman's company was well known for was building luxurious sleeping cars that made going across the country, or across a state, a luxurious first-class affair. However, through all of the fancy trains and the various worker strikes and the admittedly-creepy paternal industrial culture Pullman championed, one of the more subtle and long-lasting products his company made were streetcars and elevated railway coaches. Electric railway companies around the country, especially around the Chicago area, were loyal buyers of Pullman products, and today's Trolley Tuesday will cover just a taste to close out this month!

Trolley Thursday 7/23/20 - Illinois Traction System

If you're like my editor or I, you're probably exhausted at the huge amounts of information we had to unload on you on the weeks past concerning Chicago. Indeed, it's definitely more than I wanted to usually write for this history column, that's for sure. So for today's (late) post, we'll look at a much smaller (but still important) operation that is just as "Illinois" as the CTA. Now known as the Illinois Terminal Railroad, the Illinois Traction Railroad helped connect the Land of Lincoln's southwest corner with St. Louis across the border until it de-electrified into the shortline railroad we know today under Norfolk Southern. Today, let's wish we were in Peoria again as we take a ride aboard The Road of Service on this Trolley Thursday!

Trolley Tuesday 7/21/20 - The Chicago Transit Authority

We think of Rapid Transit service as a fact of life, infallible and ever-existent since the dawn of time. Hell, people must have thought that when the original constituent companies of the CTA first formed back in the late 1890s. Unfortunately, history has a funny way of being oh-so-reductive. Instead, we'll close out our compendium of Chicago transit with a small history on the beginnings and current operations of the Chicago Transit Authority. We'll keep the intro short this time around, because we have a lot to get through.

Trolley Thursday 7/16/20 - The Chicago Loop

Chicago is home to many prominent civil engineering masterpieces: The Hancock Center, the Sears Tower (yes those are their names, fight me), and the many bridges that line the Chicago River. One architectural wonder that tends to go over people's heads, though, is the famous Chicago Loop circling Lake Street, Wabash Avenue, Van Buren Street, and Wells Street. Originally opened in 1897, the Loop not only serves as an essential part of any Chicagoland commuter but it is also an architectural marvel above and below with its reams of cross beams and ribbons of steel rail creating beautiful, functional art. Despite its shape, the story of the Loop is more of a tangled knot of four different strings coming together into one solid mass, like your headphones in your pocket. Join us as we uncover the hidden history above our heads on today's Trolley Thursday!

Trolley Tuesday 7/14/20 - The Chicago Aurora & Elgin

The best things in life always come in threes, especially when it comes to competition. Motor racing has the "Triple Crown" of Monte Carlo, Indianapolis, and Le Mans. Horse racing has the Belmont, Preakness and Kentucky Derby stakes, and even down to electric railways in hot contention for the Charles A. Coffin Gold Medal for Innovation and Speed in Electric Railways, utilities magnate Samuel Insull had the "First and Fastest" triple crown of the North Shore line, the South Shore, and the Chicago Aurora and Elgin. Of the three, the "Roaring Elgin" was not as fast as the North Shore, nor as dependent on freight like the South Shore, but its importance in building the Fox River Valley's many cities cannot be understated. Though the shortest-lived of the three Insull-ar roads, the Great Third Rail still holds a place in interurban history.

Trolley Thursday 7/9/20 - The South Shore Line

Samuel Insull's North Shore Line might have clinched the title of "First and Fastest" in perpetuity, the famed Charles A. Coffin Gold Medal for contributions to the advancement of electric traction, but its opposite line is certainly a contender for operating in perpetuity. One of Insull's "fixer-upper lines", the Chicago South Shore and South Bend Railway (CSS, South Shore Line for short) was born out of considerable reorganization between Chicago, IL, and South Bend, IN to become a premiere interurban and freight railroad. Indeed, the South Shore proved so essential and prolific in both passenger and commercial customer service that, despite downturns and heavy cuts, the South Shore Line has never been out of operation since the first line opened in 1901. A regular runner-up of the "First and Fastest" award, the South Shore can now be considered the "Last and Longest" surviving interurban in the United States.

Trolley Tuesday 7/7/20 - The North Shore Line

In The Interurban Era, written by Trains Magazine contributor William D. Middleton, he discussed a period of America when long-distance, large-capacity interurban railways were the hottest commodity for rapid transit, specifically from the 1900s to 1963. During this time, real estate companies found land values skyrocket from having important rail corridors to downtown, while energy companies revelled in the utility subsidies they got for providing an outlet (not a pun) through electric traction. One of these railways that Middleton praises as a "super-interurban" for its quality of service is the Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee Railroad, better known as the North Shore Line, and upon its passing in 1963, Middleton noted it was the "end of the Interurban Era" in the United States. So how did a railway like this be this big of a lynchpin for Mr. Middleton? Let's find out on today's Trolley Tuesday!

Trolley Thursday 7/2/20 - Chicago Surface Lines

Chicago has had a legendary reputation in American railroading as being the hub of some of the most famous railroads in the country, and its famous meatpacking plants made the creation of the refrigerated railroad car almost inevitable. While many famous names rolled in and out of its stations like the Santa Fe, New York Central, Pennsylvania and the Milwaukee Road, Chicago also led the way with its revolutionary street and elevated railways that covered what locals called Chicagoland, the boundaries of which are pretty culturally nebulous. On this month's series of trolleyposts, we look at the rapid transit of the "Urbs in horto" and see what worked for the Second City, starting at street level with the Chicago Surface Lines! Just please, eat your Polish sausage outside the car.