Ever ride a trolley?

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I have ridden them as a kid in Memphis, later in the Big Easy and Baghdad by the Bay. One time rode one from the middle of downtown Long Beach to the downtown LA train station. Recently rode one in Vancouver but don't recall how it was powered.
I was probably in El Paso - Juarez first time in 1959. Didn't ride it.
 
Yep. I was in San Francisco awhile back attending some meetings. Not a bad little ride. Of course, I was way out of the norm back then. It seemed like most people around me either had magenta-colored hair or enough piercings where it made them look like they fell face first into a fishing tackle box.

Of course, they probably thought that the old guy wearing Wranglers, boots, a buttoned-down long-sleeved shirt and tie, and an 8x beaver felt hat looked pretty darned strange to them, too.:p
 
Mule Packer said:
Yep. I was in San Francisco awhile back attending some meetings. Not a bad little ride. Of course, I was way out of the norm back then. It seemed like most people around me either had magenta-colored hair or enough piercings where it made them look like they fell face first into a fishing tackle box.

Of course, they probably thought that the old guy wearing Wranglers, boots, a buttoned-down long-sleeved shirt and tie, and an 8x beaver felt hat looked pretty darned strange to them, too.:p
Click to expand...
Here's a link for you: it's got Mandy the Mule story
Streetcars on the Border, Survivors and Skeletons - YouTube
 
I've ridden trolleys at three museums, Railways To Yesterday at Orbisonia, PA, The PA Trolley Museum, Washington, PA and the National Capitol Trolley Museum outside DC.
Now, for actual urban trolleys still in use, I rode the ones in New Orleans in April 2004 just before they opened the Canal Street line to traffic. The Trolley car I rode on was heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina. These shots are from the Riverfront Streetcar line in New Orleans from April2004.
 

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I've ridden the ones in San Francisco, and I can barely remember riding them in Louisville, KY, before they were discontinued in favor of electrically-driven buses in the late 1940's.

If any of you remember the old Toonerville Folks cartoons, they were the work of Fontaine Fox, who grew up in Louisville. He penned the cartoons based on his experiences on the old Louisville trolley system.
 
San Francisco and New Orleans. Still ride the ones in NOLA occasionally. I like the ride through the Garden District. Several decades ago the powers that be thought it would be a good idea to tear up the tracks and run busses on Canal St. in NOLA. They're now getting rid of the busses and going back to trolleys. The cable cars in SF are interesting. They don't run on electricity but they grab moving cables under the street that are connected to a central power plant. The trolleys there run on electricity and aren't connected to the cable system. I rode electric busses somewhere. I can't remember where, maybe SF?
 
Here they called them Streetcars and I have been on many of them in the 1940's. The ones that ran between OKC and outlying towns were called Interurbans and the line going to Guthrie went across my brothers farm.
 
I grew up in Shreveport, La. We had electric trolleys all over town until probably the late 50's if memory serves me correctly (that doesn't happen much these days.). They were rubber tired with, "antennaes" on top that had rollers and ran on electric current. They could only go where the overhead wires would take them. Did you know that a coat hanger, shaped not unlike a boomerrang thrown over the trolley wires would shut down the trolleys until it was removed ? They tell me it had to be laying on both of the overhead wires. I heard of this pehnomena once in my youth. I have a fond memory, about ten years old, my Winchester 74 was locked up and I walked up to trolley stop, rode downtown to the only gunsmith, he fixed it and rode back home. Gun was over my shoulder most of the time (not in a gun case). Try that today.

These trolleys were sold to Mexico City and may still be in use there for all I know. The maids used to work for ????$/day and trolleyfare. It was part of the wage haggling.

Times do change, don't they?
 
I rode on one like this in Lisbon, Portugal years ago it is called the Elevador. It is a steep climb, the trolley floor is horizontal the street about 45 degrees! I rode it long before the "tagging" seen on this one became popular. Maybe lopping off arms or shoving spray paint cans (sideways) up the tagging scum's backsides would solve that problem.
Steve W
 

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I used to ride them in Omaha (Nebraska, there are 5 Omahas in U.S.) when much younger until they were discontinued about 1955. Fare for a kid was still 5 cents them.

Salt Lake City has an electric trolley system referred to as "Trax". Really more of an Interurban system though. Generally pretty well filled up at rush hours either in or out. Really a pretty good system with several branches. Costs a bit more than 5 cents though!

There is a parallel system, "Front Runner" that runs 44 miles from Ogden to Provo. It is a true Interurban railroad though.
 
Rode streetcars all the time as a kid in Louisville in the '40's (we moved here in '41). Then for a while we had trolley buses as well. Long gone, except for a few little diesel-powered, wheeled faux trolleys for kids and tourists to ride.
 
Grew up riding them, actually the ones (excluding wheels and frame) which were made of wood.

All straight track.
All the conductor had to do when reaching the end of the route. Unscrew his seat, walk to the other end, screw his seat in and take off.
 
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Skeetshooter,

Had much the same experience. The Chicago Street Cars were double ended. I loved how the driver would hit the "big nail" in the floor to make the clang clang sound.

Where I lived the Street Car was principally on Milwaukee Avenue with the red Chicago stone/bricks anchoring the tracks down the middle of the street.

Cars that were taken onto Milwaukee Avenue invariably had to straddle part of the track and red bricks, giving the rides a continual thump-thump experience.

Always amused by the sand boxes used to ensure
better footing on the floors soaked by melted snow tracked aboard by passengers.

Great shows of electrical sparks emanated from the wires overhead.
 
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In Australia, they call them Trams, and Brisbane had only the tracks left when I lived there, but down in Melbourne they had them and still do. Sydney still has one, I think. Lots of people ride the rail service in australia.
 
They had them in Hattiesburg, Ms. in the 20's and 30's. They were replaced by gas burning busses. You can still see the imprints on some streets of the rails that weren't pulled up. I saw an old newspaper article where two firemen were killed in 1921 when their fire truck hit a trolley while going to a fire. The streets that had trolleys are still wider than the others.
 
Going to school in the Bay Area, I had plenty of opportunity to ride the cable cars. Been to NOLA, too, and ridden the streetcars. Minneapolis used to have streetcars too, but I was pretty little when I rode them. Columbus, OH had electric buses back then, powered by overhead wires.

More recently, I had a part time gig operating an RV chassis with coachwork styled like a trolley. for weddings and similar events. These days I work as a transit operator ("bus driver" to you). Sometime next year we will begin operating in the light rail corridor, right on top of the tracks, in a few closely delimited locations.
 
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