Every once in awhile, your passions in life overlap – in my case, two of those passions are mass transit and film noir. I recently found a superb website called thetrolleydodger.com. It’s filled with tons of pictures and interesting historical facts on all forms of mass transit, but with a focus on rail (trolleys, PCC Cars, Interurbans, etc.). A series of beautifully evocative photos of nighttime trolley scenes really caught my eye – take a look at them below…
These photos were taken by Mr John F. Bromley – a contributor to the site and an author of several books on mass transit. Mr Bromley lived in Toronto, and unfortunately passed away last December. But he gifted us with a repository of beautiful photos – ones he had taken from the early 1950’s until very recently. The nighttime scenes are especially spectacular – the locations in Toronto are included for our Canadian readers who may recognize them…
Our sincere thanks to Mr David Sadowski of thetrolleydodger.com for permission to share the photos. And to steal a phrase from Motorweek’s John Davis, if you haven’t visited the site, “cruise on over”…
Note: a rerun of an older post.
I grew up with trollies so they will always have a special place in my heart. These are terrific photos; thanks for sharing them.
They still run in Kenosha, Wisconsin since 2000.
I see some A-1 Class PCC’s with the big window that were ordered by Toronto. San Francisco ran them with the standard window. More to come in a month.
What handsome machines, and photos. We never got those moderne PCC units. The Depression stopped it.
As an aside, if one were to ask a person in America – say, in a cell-phone call – ‘are you off your trolley’, it would be to enquire largely about their current location in relation to public transport. Here, that selfsame query might well be received unfavorably, as it’s a colloquial phrase that asks if the person has lost their mind! (All such vehicles here are trams). No, I’ve no idea why.
I live in the mid-Atlantic area of the US and have never heard that expression (perhaps because for most of my life there weren’t any trolleys locally. I do commonly hear in the UK “trolley” to mean what in the US is usually called a shopping cart.
Your MMTB wanted to build two new lines after WWII that would use these PCC cars. However, MMTB decided it was too expensive and so Melbourne only had two and one was a prototype of a different class.
Just so. There was no money to revamp already expensive workshops to build all-metal trams.
I rode on my last wood and steel (1940’s?) tram at least 10 years ago, and the last locally-made modern trams are nearly gone now too. It’s all French and Spanish stuff now (I think), and sadly, they look like trams anywhere in the world. Equally sadly, they’re all less comfortable than the old ones made here.
To la673, we call them shopping trolleys too. In yet another quirk, btw, we would call electric buses that run on the overhead wires ‘trolley buses’.
Can’t help but notice how many of those trolleys appear almost devoid of paying passengers. Probably one of the reasons for their demise from so many cities.
The photos we see were taken at night, so there would not have been as many passengers as there would have been at the peak hours. BTW, I did get to meet John Bromley in his later years. I also got an “attaboy” from him when I was able to give details of a 1937 photo of trolleys laid up in the Philadelphia Navy Yard…they were waiting to pick up part of a crowd, in the days before the Broad Street Subway would, with 10 trains, have .swallowed up the crowd
At least in Toronto the streetcars were always popular, along with the other public transit. I lived in Toronto until I retired 10 years ago. Until a couple of years before I retired my office was in downtown and I lived on the subway line, so I could have taken the subway to and from work, but I had the option of taking a streetcar, which I almost always did. It was much calmer, and I avoided a transfer between the north-south line and the east-west line. I always enjoyed my trip.
I had no idea the Peter Witt cars were used well into the 60s. The PCC cars lasted until the 80’s, if not the early 90s, although many were in rough shape at the end. They were a fantastic design. I miss the seats at the very back where you could look back at the cars following.The cream and red colour scheme was very attractive.
These are called “streetcars” in Toronto, never “trolleys”. As a note, the “CH” in some of the photo captions stands for “car house”.
Toronto had PCC cars in revenue service until 1995.
Stumack’s quite right – “trolley” in Toronto would have signified the electric transit buses fed from overhead wires, just like the streetcars. I’m not sure exactly when the trolleys were phased out, but my guess is the mid-1970s.
The trolley buses survived until 1993.
Those are very evocative shots, well done. For me that really drives home how much Toronto has changed over the years, at Queen and Victora virtually nothing remains from 1964.
Here’s an article of TTC streetcars and when they were retired:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_streetcar_system_rolling_stock
THANK YOU Mr. Brophy ! .
In the early 1960’s I spent a lot of time riding the PCC cars all over the Boston metro area, I will never , _EVER_ tire of looking at them and remembering being warm and cozy even in January .
-Nate
For a Torontonian this brings back so many memories. My father was born in Toronto and only ever worked for the public transit company, the TTC. My mother moved to Toronto after high school, in 1933, so they both had lots of time on the streetcars. When I was a child we would take the streetcar to get downtown. I remember my mother being excited when we got an “old” car (PeterWitt). One thing not mentioned is that originally these cars were heated by coal stoves (remember we are talking about Canada). My mother said people used to crowd around the stove. The stoves were all gone before I came along in the 50s, but through his job, my dad managed to get one of them and he installed it in our summer cottage on a lake north of the city. I don’t have a picture, but I found one on Facebook. It had a cast iron grill, but it still got very hot. The actual “pot belly” got red hot when you had a good fire going. It had a coal hopper at the top, so the coal would feed down by itself. For our use in the cottage it meant that the fire would burn all night. The stove eventually developed some cracks and was replaced by an oil furnace with forced air.