Trolley Tuesday 2/2/21 - Early Pacific Electric Cars, 1902-1911

Whether Henry E. Huntington liked it or not, he was similar to his rival (E.H. Harriman) in a lot of ways. Both were interested in cornering and monopolizing a single market (the entire western US railway system for Harriman, all of Los Angeles' real estate and mass transit electric railways for Huntington), but another lesser-known similarity between the two men were their need for standardization. Harriman had his own design of passenger cars and steam locomotives between the Union Pacific (UP) and the Southern Pacific (SP), while Huntington's own consistent style came from the 5-window designs found on many of his streetcars built by the St. Louis Car Company and J.G. Brill of Philadelphia. On the first Trolley Tuesday of February, we begin our look into the Pacific Electric Fleet by looking at the cars that came before the Great Merger of 1911.

Trolley Tuesday 1-19-21 - The Mount Lowe Railway

Los Angeles is a land of attraction. We live on spectacle and we're always looking for the next big thing to part tourists from their dollars, whether it's theme parks like Disneyland or Universal Studios, or even obvious tourist traps like those offensively-slow celebrity tour vans that drive up and down Mulholland Drive and get in the way of my need for sp-

*Ahem.*

For Angelinos in the early 1900s, the biggest attraction by far was the famous "Mount Lowe Railway", a combination electric railway and funicular built into a Southwestern Peak of the San Gabriel Mountains and overlooking much of LA County. When built, the railway was a marvel of engineering and unique among its peers for being the only overhead-wire mountain railway in America. But how did this unique draw fall so hard down the face of Mount Lowe? We find out this, and more, on today's Trolley Tuesday as we relive the echoes of trolley wheels and clattering funicular mechanisms on the Mount Lowe Railway.