The biggest drawback was the huge initial investment required. Trenches had to be dug under the streets and fitted out with iron yokes to form conduits for the cable loop. An elaborate steam power plant had to be built with massive engines to circulate the cable, and the enormous cable itself had to be installed, maintained and frequently replaced.
When Chicago opened its first cable line in 1882—still several years before electric systems were perfected—it seemed to prove to many street railway men that the technology was reliable enough to operate in harsh summer and winter climates and could handle the load of many cars running simultaneously in a concentrated urban environment. It was soon the darling of the streetcar industry.
Having made its decision, all that the Washington & Georgetown line needed was Congressional approval, which came in March 1889. Work began immediately afterward on converting the Seventh Street route, an almost perfectly straight line that was the easiest of the company’s three routes to convert. In September, a crew of some four hundred men began digging the massive trench that would form the cable conduit and fitting it with cast-iron yokes made in Dayton, Ohio. New grooved rails from the Cambria Iron Works in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, were laid on the surface. Work on the conduit was finished by the end of the year, and in January 1890, an enormous iron-and-wood spindle, twelve feet in diameter, arrived at the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad’s freight yard. Weighing ninety-seven thousand pounds, it contained the thirty-four-thousand-foot cable that would span the length of the Seventh Street line, from the wharves on the Southwest waterfront up to Boundary Street, where a popular new baseball park, eventually to be called Griffith Stadium, was to open the following year.
The line finally went into service on April 12, 1890. Veteran cable car “gripman” Lawrence Ody of San Francisco skillfully operated the first car, which was packed with dignitaries. Crowds lined the streets cheering the speedy new cars and jostling to get aboard wherever they could. Many people rode all the way down to the Seventh Street wharves to see the new powerhouse at the end of the line and watch its great engine wheels turning the cable. Just four trains (consisting of a grip car pulling two unpowered “trailer” cars) ran the first day because only four trained gripmen were on hand. More trains were added in subsequent days as additional operators were trained.
Even before the Seventh Street line opened, the W&G began to convert its other two lines, on Fourteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, and those lines opened in August 1892. The Pennsylvania Avenue line in particular represented a much more complex engineering task, having a total of thirty-four curves, but the technology had advanced by then, and relatively few problems were encountered. After the cable went into operation, a trip from Georgetown to the Navy Yard, which previously took an hour, lasted just forty minutes, and a ride up Fourteenth Street to Columbia Heights ran twenty minutes. According to the Evening Star, the railroad spent $3 million to build the entire cable system, including its two powerhouses—the equivalent of at least $460 million in today’s money.57
In addition to the W&G, the Columbia Railway converted to cable power for a brief period in the late 1890s. Here a class of schoolchildren takes an excursion on a Columbia cable car in 1899. Library of Congress via Maryland Rail Heritage Library.
The crown jewel of the new system was the imposing new powerhouse on Pennsylvania Avenue, between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets, that powered both the Fourteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue lines. The real estate alone for this massive edifice had cost $500,000. Designed by Kansas City architect Walter C. Root (1859–1925), who specialized in railroad-related architecture, the grand six-story Romanesque Revival structure was perhaps the largest privately owned building in the city at the time and filled an entire block. A carved stone arch resting on marble piers framed its ceremonial main entrance. Inside, eight massive iron boilers were arrayed on the ground floor, which was structurally separate from the rest of the building so that vibrations would not be felt on the upper floors. Corporate offices and rented space filled the stories above them. A soaring 150-foot smokestack stood at the rear of the site.
An 1897 drawing of the Capital Traction cable powerhouse on Pennsylvania Avenue. Washington Times, September 30, 1897.
The system had its biggest test less than a month after it began operation, when the Grand Army of the Republic—a huge fraternal organization of Union veterans of the Civil War—held an encampment in Washington. On one day during the convention, cable cars shuttled 170,000 passengers, almost four times their usual load, and encountered few problems. Washington’s mass transportation system had entered a new age.
“FOLLIES LITTLE, IF ANY, SHORT OF CRIMINAL”
The Washington & Georgetown’s cable cars were the earliest rapid transit cars to run on busy downtown Washington streets. The Seventh Street cars traveled at nine miles per hour, twice as fast as the average pace of horse-drawn cars. For safety reasons, the railroad set a rule that the cars could not be hailed mid-block, as had been customary with horsecars, and would only stop at the far side of intersections. Patrons were cautioned not to attempt to board or alight when the cars were moving—another common practice with horsecars. Unfortunately, Washingtonians had no experience with the kind of power and speed the new streetcars represented, and they were slow to recognize their unique dangers. An editorial in the Washington Post in 1893 expressed exasperation at the lack of common sense displayed by cable car patrons:
[W]e persist in jumping on and off while the trains are in motion, in alighting on the side on which we may be struck by passing cars, and, generally, in committing follies little, if any, short of criminal. One cannot take even the shortest ride upon the cable car without having his heart in his throat a dozen times. The way in which men and women tempt Providence is beyond belief. They act as though they expected all the physical laws to be suspended for their benefit, and nature itself to wait upon their caprice.58
The newspapers regularly reported on cable car accidents, fueling the technology’s dangerous reputation. Several fatalities occurred when pedestrians walked casually in the path of oncoming cars, expecting them to be able to stop as quickly as horsecars could. Others suffered injuries when, as standing passengers, they were knocked down by the sudden acceleration of the car gripping the cable, another unfamiliar experience.
Especially dangerous was alighting on the street side of the cars, as passengers would land directly in the path of streetcars coming in the opposite direction. George H. Rhodes, of 111 Third Street Northeast, was one such victim who jumped off a moving car and was struck by another car coming the other way. His injuries proved fatal. Mrs. John P. Anderson was struck by a southbound car as she tried to board on the street side of a northbound car on the Seventh Street line. She was pushed “some distance” along the rails by the cable car’s fender but was lucky to survive her ordeal. Eventually, streetcars would be designed to allow entry and exit only from the curbside.
All the while that riders were creating unnecessary hazards for themselves, the newly hired gripmen were busy trying to keep their cars moving. Controlling how the car’s grip grabbed and let go of the cable was not an easy task. A gripman had to be of a strong physique to handle the long, heavy lever that controlled the grip, and it took great skill for him to do so without jerking the car forward or damaging the grip or the cable. The biggest potential safety horror was the specter of the grip becoming so entangled in a frayed cable that it couldn’t let go. If that were to happen, the car would continue zinging along the roadway at nine miles per hour with no way to stop until it crashed or the power plant stopped the cable. How often this may have actually happened in D.C. is not known.
Another challenge occurred when two cable routes crossed, as they did at Seventh Street and Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest. The gripman whose cable passed underneath (in this case, the Pennsylvania Avenue line) had to let it go before the intersection, coast through and then grab the cable again on the other side. Such intersections were
dangerous for pedestrians, horses and other vehicles because the cable cars were largely out of control as they coasted through. In April 1896, the Washington Times warned that “death will reign” at the intersection of Fourteenth Street and New York Avenue Northwest because three rapid transit lines—the Washington & Georgetown’s Fourteenth Street cable car line as well as the Eckington and one other electric line—all crossed at the same intersection. “Flagmen, be they ever so attentive, cannot prevent the unwary citizen or rural visitor from getting bewildered, and a whole squad of police would not give adequate protection,” the newspaper feared. While collisions did occur, the predicted mayhem at Fourteenth and New York never materialized. Beginning in 1898, D.C. street railway companies were required to pay the salaries of traffic policemen at such intersections to protect public safety.
A MODEL CITY
Meanwhile, the city’s other streetcar lines had to make their own decisions on how to convert. Even as the W&G’s cable lines went into service, the Evening Star kept up its drumbeat against overhead-wire trolleys, which were fast becoming the preferred choice of streetcar companies across America.
In February 1888, less than a year after Henry Hurt and Charles Glover decided to convert the W&G to cable, the first large-scale urban electric trolley system entered service in Richmond, Virginia, proving the economic and technical viability of overhead electric systems. Connecticut-born inventor Frank J. Sprague (1857–1934), who had spent several years working for Thomas Edison, had been wrestling with the problem of how to distribute electricity efficiently to streetcars for many years. He had formed his own electric railway company in 1884 and worked for years on small demonstration projects, as did other inventors. These small-scale demonstrations failed to prove decisively that the technology would work in major urban settings, where dozens of cars would be operating simultaneously on the same line. It was hard to believe that the electric current sent out over those thin little overhead wires would be strong enough to power all those cars.
The trolley system that Sprague built in Richmond dispelled those concerns. While there were glitches when it first came on line, Sprague was a master at resolving them. He had also solved key technical problems, such as how to mount trolley poles on car tops so they would link reliably with the overhead wires. In the months following the opening of the Richmond system, executives from street railways across the country came to observe the new Sprague trolleys, and they were universally impressed. Sprague famously orchestrated a demonstration one evening in which he lined up twenty-two cars and had them all start up briskly one after another without straining the electrical power system. Soon orders for electric overhead trolley systems based on Sprague’s patented methods were coming in from all over America.
But the proliferation of trolleys only steeled the determination of the Washington Star to prevent such systems from taking root in the capital. In October 1892, the newspaper ran a lengthy feature written by Theodore W. Noyes (1858–1946), son of Crosby Noyes, after he returned from an extensive European tour of modern streetcar systems. Noyes chided American (and particularly Washington) streetcar companies for their lack of inventiveness:
Our national boast is that nothing is impossible to American inventiveness, that what other people have failed or neglected to achieve we accomplish speedily and thoroughly. A notable exception to this national self-confidence is found apparently in the great electric companies and many street railway magnates, who declare with one accord in a concert of self-deprecation that no form of electric railway motor but the trolley can be made commercially practicable in America, and that the only substitute for the antiquated car horse that American ingenuity can devise, even for our large cities, is the aggravation of the overhead pole and the wire evil.59
Surely, Noyes argued, there were other viable alternatives. He was particularly intrigued by the system operating in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, an electrical system that used underground conduits to feed power to the cars. He described the system in great detail, noting that it functioned perfectly well in inclement weather, contrary to worries by American streetcar company officials that rain or snow would short out underground electrical conduits and cause them to fail. Drawing many comparisons between Budapest and Washington, Noyes concluded that Washington streetcar systems could readily convert to battery-powered, cable or underground conduit electrical systems. By doing so, Washington would become “a model city, not only of America, but of the world, to which students from all parts of the globe will resort for suggestions concerning the latest and best forms of street railway motor.”
“THIS SUPERB IMPROVEMENT IN ELECTRIC PROPULSION”
For the Metropolitan Railroad, chief competitor to the Washington & Georgetown line and the city’s second-largest streetcar company, the pressure was on. The Metropolitan had struggled with the conversion issue and had delayed making a final decision as long as it could. Company executives ruled out cable technology because they felt that their lines had too many bends and turns to make cable feasible. With overhead wires also out of the question, where else could they turn? In 1889, they decided to adopt a battery-based electric system. The Metropolitan would become the first large streetcar system in the country to adopt battery-powered cars.
“Storage batteries,” as they were called at the time, had the advantage of being less expensive than cable because no underground conduits were needed and no expensive cable had to be installed and maintained. However, battery power had few other advantages. The batteries of the day couldn’t retain a charge for very long, took a long time to recharge, were very heavy and had to be replaced often. Most significantly, battery-powered cars tended to be sluggish, especially around curves, and thus were unpopular with riders. The Metropolitan tried to phase them in, running a mix of battery and horsecars on its lines; however, taking the less expensive path proved to be a bad idea. Batteries were abandoned after three years, in October 1893.
At this point, the Metropolitan was in dire straits. The Congressional deadline of July 1893 to convert away from horsepower had passed, and the Justice Department accordingly began proceedings to revoke the company’s charter. Meanwhile, the archrival Washington & Georgetown line had fully converted to cable and was happily providing fast, efficient service to its satisfied customers. The Metropolitan needed something—anything—to replace its antique horsecars and get back in the game.
The Star began worrying that the Metropolitan would insist that it had no choice but to convert to an overhead wire–based system. The newspaper claimed that most Washingtonians didn’t believe the company had really run out of choices. “[T]here is a wide opposition to the conclusion…that Congress will have no alternative but to grant permission to the road to introduce the trolley,” it warned. “There is a very large contingent who do not swallow the statements that, in the first place, the road could not be equipped with the cable system, and, second that the underground trolley is not a practical success.”60 The day of reckoning seemed to be close. If the Metropolitan were allowed to adopt overhead wires, there was little doubt that the city would soon be virtually cocooned with them.
Fortunately, the Metropolitan backed down from the fight, opting to spend the money to build an underground electrical conduit system. With the company’s support, Congress passed a new law in 1894 giving the Metropolitan time and authorization to convert to such a system. The company’s engineers reached out to the operators of the Budapest, Austria-Hungary system, who assured them that an underground system would work in Washington.
Construction began in late 1894, with the Ninth Street line being first to go into operation on July 29, 1895. During a trial run, the Star noted approvingly that the Metropolitan’s new electric streetcars ran much more smoothly than the cable cars of the Washington & Georgetown line:
A typical 1890s electric streetcar of the Metropolitan Railroad. Robert A. Truax Collection, courtesy of Jerry A. McCoy.
In spite of the fact that the track was very
dirty—made so by excavating and other work done beneath and on each side of it—the running was remarkably smooth, and especially was this noticed at the curves, where there is commonly much extremely discomforting motion of a decidedly jerky sort. The stops and starts were without jar, and, in fact, there was no opportunity for even the most critical passenger to speak of either the cars or the underground system by which they are operated in any other than terms of hearty commendation.61
Distinguished banker John Joy Edson (1846–1935), one of the dignitaries who rode on the line’s first official trip, credited the Star for the success of the new system:
The building of this road is due as much to The Star as anything else—I might say more than to any other cause…. Its brave and insistent fight against the trolley made it impossible for that kind of rapid transit to gain foothold in Washington, and so this superb improvement in electric propulsion was made imperative.62
The Metropolitan soon began to convert its other lines to underground electric conduit, completing the changeover of its entire system by early 1897. As the turn of the new century drew near, the Metropolitan, which had procrastinated for so long and agonized over its choices, was suddenly the city’s technology leader. It had leapfrogged the smug and conservative W&G, whose jerky cable system now seemed obsolete. In fact, the Metropolitan’s underground conduit system would become the de facto standard for all Washington streetcar lines in coming years, but not before more agonizing decisions were made and much more drama was played out.
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