A few more interesting vintage photos of buses and trolleys at work in the middle of the 20th century…
Nice photo of downtown Detroit in the early ’50s. Can make out a PCC trolley, a Checker bus, a Twin Coach, and a GM Old Look.
Pacific Electric PCC rolling though Glendale CA – the Vogue Theater is in the background…playing “Anna Lucasta” and “The Great Sinner”, both released in 1949…
Los Angeles PCC’s in Metro Transit Authority (blue) and LA Transit Lines (yellow) livery circa 1960…LAMTA purchased and consolidated all the remaining LA private bus and streetcar lines in the late 50’s…
GM Old Look on Woodward Ave in Detroit – late 50’s. You can see the Wagner Edsel dealership in the background…
Late night LAMTA PCC near City College – 1960…
Detroit Dept of Street Railways (DSR) GM Old Look on Michigan Ave – late 50’s. In the background you can see the sign for the Peoples Department Store – the store’s motto: “It’s easy to pay – the People’s way!”
DSR St Louis Car Company 48 pax electric trolley – late 50’s…
DSR GM Old Look in the early 60’s – Detroit encouraged advertising on buses to help with revenue.
Bus Parade – the first GM New Looks arrive from the Pontiac Michigan factory to Detroit – Feb 1960…
LAMTA barn…ACF-Brill T-46 trolleys…late 50’s. After electrification ended in 1963, these buses were sold to Mexico City.
“J Line” LAMTA PCC downtown in early 60’s…
Philadelphia PCC – mid-60’s…
Marmon-Herrington TC-48 trolley bus in Philadelphia – 1967. Lit Brothers was a well known Department store chain…
Philadelphia is one of only five cities in the US that continue today to operate electric trolley buses – here a current New Flyer E40LFR Dual Motor.
DSR GM Old Looks passing each other near Cobo Hall – mid-60’s…
In 1966, DSR purchased several small buses from the Passenger Truck Equipment Corp of Huntington CA for use as downtown shuttles – it used a Dodge chassis…
Southern California Rapid Transit District (SCRTD) Flxible New Look headed to Long Beach in the mid-60’s…
Last LAMTA PCC car route, March 1963…
Thanks for the pictures. Brought back some memories of Downtown Detroit of old. I even remember Vita Boy potato chips.
The Peoples Department Store was also called Peoples Outfitters.
Pwhoar, pure bus porn.
OK, that could be misinterpreted. I’ll start again.
These pics really are a treat, as they let the mind tumble straight down from our time to theirs. The photos would have been dull shots of stinky buses when new, but by their digital journey through time to us now they are transformed into little pieces of art, and art to be stared at.
The Philly shot with tram and kid and red 2-door Chev is my pick.
The reverie appeal of simpler and better-looking times pulls strongly, until I notice the blackened buildings from the cancerous and chokingly unemissioned smoke, and I remember that I am happy for many more reasons than that to be looking on from the world of 2020.
Mr B, what’s the white van – with desirable Soft Pretzels, no less – in the 14th photo, from Philadelphia? It looks English, but surely isn’t, as only someone who was a soft pretzel themselves would own such an import for commercial work back then?
Thanks for the comments Justy – the van looks like a International-Harvester (IH) Metro Van – popular as a delivery vehicle and as a vendor truck (pretzels, ice cream, etc.) in the 40’s -70’s here in the US.
Four photos up from the bottom – just above the one labelled George Krambles photo – I love the old Labatts beer logo in the upper left of the black and white photo of the small bus. I think they kept using that logo up to the early 1980s, by which time they then owned a partial stake in the Toronto Blue Jays.
The very first photo caught my eye = above the new look bus – an interest rate of 4 1/4 per cent – nice returns today in a bank account!
Great photos. I love trolley, bus, and streetcar pictures.
Love ’em all! But now I want a soft pretzel. 🙂
Don’t ask me why, but I’m partial to that red ‘63 Impala. 😉
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/cc-kids-yes-officer-he-does-look-a-bit-young-for-his-age/
I rode to high school on the NOPSI (New Orleans Public Service Inc) busses similar the top photo.
I was counting the days till I got my driver’s license.
Hey 3SpeedAutomatic, you wouldn’t happen to remember what color those seats were in the old NOPSI buses, would you?
The Philadelphia photo with the kid and the red Chevy is a Route 15 trolley on Girard Avenue. Trolleys were still running on Girard Ave until a recent “temporary” conversion to bus service. SEPTA has a history of temporary bus conversions becoming permanent despite promises to the contrary and significant public support for trolleys. 18 PCC cars were rebuilt about 20 years ago and Route 15 is the only remaining line running solely on the surface and using the PCCs.
Philadelphia still has 5 subway/surface trolley lines which serve West Philly on surface streets and Center City in a tunnel under Market Street. These lines run modern (although aging) Kawasaki cars.
Yes, and the trolleys that were still running on Girard Avenue about five years ago looked exactly like the one in that picture, not a bit newer.
Growing up in Pittsburgh in the mid-seventies through early-eighties, I was a big trolley fan, and new about the new Kawasakis and the subway-surface routes, but didn’t realize how much of the surface system from the northwest through center city survived. Lines like that, even some that used the Mt. Washington tunnel, were gone from Pittsburgh after 1971. Even when i visited friends there after college in the late eighties, the 23 Germantown Avenue line was still running.
Per the first photo, I would very much like to “put my money to work” at 4.25%, thank you.
The Motor City pics seem to be the ones with the most people walking…great pics, and all the advertising is fun to look at too. I don’t miss cigarettes everywhere but I did like the Marlboro ad imagery when I was a kid, weird to now find myself driving through some of those pictured locations at times.
I’m particularly liking the Long Beach bus with the new-ish Thunderbird a lane over.
If you zoom in you can see that the T-Bird is pretty banged up.
The Philadelphia photo with the trolley and water ice truck is nearby where I grew up. The entire area was built up over a few years in the early 1950s. To give an indication of how quickly it was developed, my father attended junior high school a few blocks from where that photo was taken, but about 15 years before… the school was entirely surrounded by farmland.
From a transit perspective, that part of Philadelphia was an odd combination of urban and suburban. The houses were relatively dense, and mostly rowhouses or twins (duplexes), but houses had little front yards and often garages and alleys. All of the commercial developments were shopping centers with large parking lots, such as the Lit Brothers building in the photo. And the roads were all very wide. When I was growing up, I considered Northeast Philadelphia to be the worst of the city combined with the worst of the suburbs.
The intersection in the photo of the PTC trolley and water ice truck (pronounced “wooter ice”) is Cottman Ave. at Castor Ave. in Philadelphia. My wife’s maternal grandparents lived about a block off the left side of the photograph. She went to school in the large building in the distance.
Yes, when I was growing up, Lit Brothers was gone, and replaced by the discount department store Clover. That’s long gone now too. My grandmother still lives about a mile away from there today.
I rode a lot of New Looks as a student, and though their exteriors hardly changed over 20 years, there was a reliably easy way I found then to know if I was boarding a typically worn out ancient version, or a more recent bus. Even from half a city block away. They all featured that trapezoid ‘GM’ logo on their nose. In the earlier ones, up to 1969 or so, the ‘GM’ letters were set in a older serif typeface. Buses sold in the 70s, it was set in a more modern sanserif face. And the newer ones typically had ‘GMC’. Back then, operators seemed more likely to let the condition of the older models deteriorate. Some of them were brutal, with leaking windows everywhere, many rattles, and worn out seats.
Alternately, some transit agencies, used the first two digits in bus serial numbers as the year they were purchased.
As a rider, one of the biggest improvements to the New Looks came near the end when they introduced double rear doors, and rear doors that opened automatically when you stepped down.
What I remember is you could never get those windows to open, they wouldn’t budge.
Also, it was possible for pranksters to jam the rear doors by forcing the folding sequence wrong. Then, the bus was stuck due to the safety system that held the brakes while the doors were open. The driver then had to go back there an un-jam the door.
We had an old Main street People’s department (mostly clothing, shoes and fabric, as I recall) store on the rural NC mountain town where I grew up. 2 stories with creaky wood floors. I did not realize it was part of a chain.
I’ve read that electric trolleys and buses were more or less forced out of existence by big producers of gasoline and diesel buses like GM in order to expand their markets. Is this true or an over simplification?
Many of the electric trolley bus operations depended on electric distribution designed and built for electric streetcars. When they died off..with the help of a predatory oil/diesel bus/tire conspiracy…that infrastructure declined. Some cities with plentiful hydroelectric power, like San Francisco and Vancouver BC, were able to retain substantial electric transit. In both, there is a connection between transit and the generation and distribution of electric power.
We had no cheap hydro power in Los Angeles, but rest assured, between the Department of Water and Power, as well as Southern California Edison, politically connected electric power infrastructure was there.
I’m only vaguely bus-knowledgable, but it’s great to see these and the “time-travel” the photos represent.
PHOTO #1: I would have guessed it a little earlier, but ad on the bus’s side is helpful. I see the ACME supermarkets (NY, PA, etc.) were having a “Shower of Diamonds” promotion for their 75th anniversary, announced in September 1966:
Good catch! Here’s a print ad for Acme’s Shower of Diamonds. I think this wound up being a somewhat controversial promotion, as it led to scattered boycotts from folks who objected to a gambling-type promotion for jewelry at a supermarket:
That LAMTA barn picture may have been after they were taken out of service and getting ready for shipment to Mexico. Black license plates were a new issue for ’63. Note the E surrounded by an octagon, denoting local government agency exempt from fees. State owned vehicles had a diamond around the E.