Trolley Thursday 9/17/20 - The Conestoga Traction Company

 Deep in Pennsylvania's Dutch Country, you wouldn't expect something as modern as an interurban system to intrude upon the otherwise peaceful, low-tech life of the Amish. However, even the Dutch country was not free of its own interurban system, and quite a large one at that. The Conestoga Traction Company may be forgotten now, but at one point it was one of the largest non-metropolitan systems in Pennsylvania, providing farmers and travelers with means to get from its center at Lancaster to the tiny farm towns such as Elizabethtown, Pequea, and even Strasburg. It even formed the basis for a notable comic and cartoon series! But all of that, and more, lies in today's Trolley Tuesday!

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A Simple Country Trolley

An early Brill Stretcar, No. 165, shares the street with
a horse-and-buggy in an undated photo within Lancaster.
(Kent Dickason)

Before the advent of interurban service, transportation needs in the Dutch Country were met by horse and buggy. This method was often dusty in the summer, and mud-bogged in the winter, and altogether not that fast as the next town over could be a day or multiple day's trip. The railroads had already gone through the town of Lancaster and Strasburg, thanks to the Pennsylvania and the original Strasburg Railroads in the 1830s, but local service out to Elizabethtown in the west (which was operated by the Pennsylvania) and Adamstown to the East, plus York Furnace in the South meant that the farm country was ripe for this new-fangled electric railway by the 1890s. But before this new line could open, disaster already struck.

The Chickies Park Trolley Disaster

Before the Conestoga Traction Company was created to connect the cities of Western Pennsylvania, early service was provided under the Pennsylvania Traction Company (different to the PTC we talked about earlier). One of the PTC's lines ran from the small town of Marietta to Columbia via Chickies Park (or Chiques Park then) and due the park station, it made for a great summer destination with an amusement park, religious band concerts (we ARE in the Dutch Country, after all), and hiking and climbing at Chickies Rock, overlooking the Susquehanna River. With so many people going to the park, streetcar service was at an all-time demand, and any one delay could spell trouble.

Pennsylvania Traction Company No. 2 in 1894, the same type as car No. 61. 
(Uncharted Lancaster)

The route of Car No. 61, with the accident site
shown in red.
(Uncharted Lancaster)

Such was the case on August 9, 1896, when PTC No. 61 found itself delayed getting to Chickies Park following an intense thunderstorm. No. 61 was a "California-style" car of two open ends sandwiching a center enclosed section, so it wasn't prudent to operate it in the rain; No. 61 also only had capacity for 28 people, but by the time it arrived at 10PM at Chickies Park, almost 80 adults and children piled into the single car in a desperate bid to get home. The wet rails did not help the extra weight, as motorman Adam Foehlinger and Conductor Harry Hershey discovered when they overshot a requested stop at Klinesville by 150 feet. 

As they were now underway, the streetcar was now heading downhill towards the next town of Columbia a mile south. The still-overloaded car was now picking up speed, but there was now a new problem: millions of potato bugs had swarmed the track in the dark, and the insects being squished under the wheels all but rendered the brakes useless. As the trolley picked up speed, the pole was flung off the wire and plunged everything into darkness. People screamed as the speed hit a blistering 60 miles per hour, then flew off a curve. It slammed into a gatepost, slide on its side, hit a tree, then another power line pole, before dropping 30 feet into an embankment, landing upside down. 

Motorman Foehlinger, Conductor Hershey, along with the mayor of Columbia, H.H. Heise, and four other people died, while 68 were left injured. Despite the PTC adding a safety stop at Klinesville, damage claims from the disaster bankrupted the Pennsylvania Traction Company and they were forced out of business by the end of the year. Its Marietta-Columbia route was then folded into the Conestoga Traction Company (CTC), which began operating in 1899. 

A Wagon-Wheel System

The CTC system in 1903, with proposed extensions
to Elizabethtown, Maytown and Terre Hill.
Strasburg is on the lower right.
(Street Railroad Journal)

From the start, the CTC decided to distance itself from its predecessor by making it one of the safest and speediest streetcar lines in West Pennsylvania. Its right-of-way was set up following the horse-and-buggy roads to neighboring towns, which also gave it an advantage of meeting with local farmsteads to carry freight and dairy to market. As the line grew out from its headquarters in Lancaster, it ran out to Strasburg (displacing the steam shortline's passenger operations to Lancaster), Minersville, Manheim, Kissel Hill, and as far north as Adamstown. All of these lines were referred to as separate railways, such as the "Lancaster & Strasburg Railway", "Lancaster & Minersville Railway", and the CTC operated six of these railways by 1903, with extensions out to York Furnace, New Holland, and Adamstown opened by that year (and plenty more planned).

The CTC even interchanged with some notable neighbors. The Hershey Transit shared a special through-freight service with the CTC, allowing Amish milk to be freighted to the Hershey Chocolate Factory, and in turn CTC cars were allowed to bring summer vacationers and day-trippers out to Hershey Park. (An episode specifically about Hershey's electric railways is coming soon). Other neighbors helped connect the farming interurban with the big city center in Philadelphia, including the Philadelphia & West Chester Railway (also known as the Red Arrow), and the government center in Harrisburg via the CTC's "Lancaster & Ephrata Railway" to Lebanon and Hershey. Though this method was slow and impractical, it helped citizens realize that their state was shrinking smaller and smaller with so many trolley companies springing up.

All roads lead to Rome, but all trolley tracks converge on downtown Lancaster's Penn Square.
(Kent Dickason)

Notable Rolling Stock

A Tale of Two Brills: Birney No. 215 en route to "West Belt"
gets passed by an indeterminate Brill "convertible" car in
Lancaster, 1938.Note the bare "people-catcher" on the right car.
(Kent Dickason)

By 1910, the last new line (Lancaster-Coatesville) opened and brought the entire system roster to 13. Their rolling stock by this time were made of old Brill wooden cars built between 1898 and 1906, with the first being ex-Pennsylvania Traction Company No. 5. Upon being transferred to CTC ownership, the car was named "Lancaster" and was immediately followed by ten 1901 Brill cars with all but two being combination passenger-baggage cars. After 1910, Cincinnati Car Company was contracted to build a new series of interurbans between 1911 and 1913, along with a fleet of "Curveside" streetcars in 1924. The last cars to run on the Conestoga Traction Company (renamed to Conestoga Transportation Company in 1931) were 40 200-series Birney cars built by Brill between 1921 and 1926 for use in local Lancaster city operations. CTC also had a self-propelled snow-blower for when the winters got rough, though unlike most interurban snow blowers, it definitely looked like the shrunk-down version of the big thing.

Conestoga Transportation Co. No. 66 lays over at Ephrata yard in the early 1940s.
This and the car behind it are G.C. Kuhlman "Curvside" car designs.
(Kent Dickason)

CTC's rotary plow in service, with two trolley poles indicating it was self-propelled.
It's funny to think if they were pushed by trolleys, though.
(Kent Dickason)

A Looney Toony Trolley

Fontaine Fox at his desk, 1918.
(Sigma Chi Quarterly)

Incredibly, the Conestoga Traction Company also formed the basis for one of the most iconic comic strips and cartoon series in American history. Cartoonist Fontaine Fox always had the idea to make a comic strip but he never knew what it was about until a visit to his friend, fellow cartoonist Charlie Vought, in 1908 spurred him on. When he and his wife arrived at the Pelham Station in New York City to meet the streetcar, he described it as thus:

At the station, we saw a rattletrap of a streetcar, which had as its crew and skipper a wistful old codger with an Airedale beard. He showed as much concern in the performance of his job as you might expect from Captain Hartley when docking the Leviathan.

Inspired by this sight, he immediately began developing what would be his most famous work, "Toonerville Folks", with a "trolley that met all the trains" as its centerpiece. The comic strip's farmland surroundings and boonie operations were directly inspired by the CTC and other West Pennsylvanian streetcars like it, as Fox was taken by the charm and laid-back nature that lent itself well to comical hijinks. Fox drew the comic and oversaw production of both the live-action silent films and cartoons (produced by the Van Beuren Studios) until 1955, when the comic strip ended. Today, the "Toonerville Trolley" lives on as a shorthand for any wacky backwater antique in revenue operation.

A cover to a 1921 Fontaine Fox cartoon compendium, prominently featuring the Toonerville Trolley,
a generic converted horsecar design popular in the late-1890s.
(Cupples & Leon Co)

Car Stop

The Conestoga Traction Company, circa 1940.
(Kent Dickason)

Not even a popular cartoon could save the Conestoga Transportation Company. By the 1920s, automobile use had grown in West Pennsylvania and the streetcars found themselves in dire financial straits entering the Great Depression. The CTC abandoned all but four railway lines in 1932, putting the money towards investing in gasoline buses and diesel buses in 1936. Wartime brought some much-needed ridership, but the company fell even harder by 1946 when all but two lines (The Rocky Springs and Ephrata Lines) were closed. The comically-bumpy Birneys were the last cars to operate for the CTC, with the Ephrata Line forced open by the US Government to meet postwar transportation needs. When its neighbor, Hershey Transit, closed in 1946, the last Birney rolled along the streets of Lancaster in 1947. The bus lines folded into the Red Rose Transit Authority after World War II, which continues to this day. 

The Penn Square junction is dug up and dismantled in 1947.
(LNP)

Birney Car No. 236 is trucked to its new home at the 
Landis Brothers Farming Museum in September, 1947.
(LNP)

The many cars of the CTC were scrapped en masse at Rocky Springs, where according to author Kurt R. Bell, "they were turned over on their sides and systematically burned" in September, 1947. One car, thankfully, survives today at the Manheim Historical Society as CTC No. 236, originally built by Brill in 1926. Instead of being burned, the car was sold to the Lancaster Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society (NRHS) and displayed at the Landis Brothers Farm Museum in Landis Valley. In 1953, the NRHS donated the car to the State of Pennsylvania, who had it stored until it deteriorated so badly it was moved to the Metropolitan Philadelphia Railway Association's Red Arrow Carbarn in Llanerch. After a brief escape to Trolley Valhalla in Tansboro, New Jersey, the car was stored for 30 years back at Landis Valley before being loaned to the Manheim Historical Society. After an extensive return to operation, No. 236 now operates occasionally on a reconstructed stretch of city track and is still owned by the State of Pennsylvania.

Conestoga Traction Company No. 236 at its permanent home
in Manheim, Pennsylvania.
(Jon Bell)

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Thank you for reading today's late Trolley Thursday! We hope you've enjoyed your ride, and I'd like to credit today's resources: The CPTDB's page on the Conestoga Traction Company (including an all-time roster), LancasterOnline's article about when its trolley was abandoned, Uncharted Lancaster's retelling of the Chickies Park Trolley Disaster, and the Friends of Philadelphia Trolley's The Streamliner newsletter. Museum shoutouts today go to the Manheim Historical Society. As usual, if you want to find myself or my editor, please follow our twitters and support us by maybe buying some merch from our store! My editor also has made his own board game, which you can purchase here. Until next we meet, ride safely!