Over the past few years, I have written a number of articles on the history of public transportation in the DC region, including articles on streetcars, commuter rail lines, and proposals for rapid transit predating the construction of Metrorail. I’ve also written a pair of articles about Baltimore’s largely-forgotten Guilford Avenue elevated streetcar line and other obscure early elevated lines. These articles were all written for Greater Greater Washington, although one of them was cross-posted with the D.C. Policy Center.
Streetcar and Bus History in the DC Region
In 2016 and 2017, I wrote a series of three articles on the history of some of the DC region’s suburban streetcar lines. Two of these articles focused on lines that once served the northwestern portion of Prince George’s County, where I grew up and still live: the Washington, Berwyn, and Laurel (later known as the “Maryland Line”) and the Washington, Spa Spring & Gretta.
The third article in the series discussed a short-lived effort to use “Evans Auto-Railers”—dual-mode vehicles that could use steel wheels to run on streetcar tracks and rubber tires to operate on city streets—to save the Arlington and Fairfax Railway’s service connecting the Fairfax City and the Roslyn-Ballston corridor to downtown DC.
- “A streetcar used to run from H Street to Berwyn Heights, near College Park“
- “A streetcar used to run down Rhode Island Avenue, connecting College Park and downtown DC“
- “It’s part streetcar, part bus, and it ran in Arlington and Fairfax in the 1930s“
In addition to these articles, in September 2018 I wrote a companion piece to my and David Alpert’s series on improving Metrobus discussing the history of DC’s rather arcane bus route numbers in a 1936 effort to rationalize the District’s recently-unified streetcar network: “8W? 30N? U7? How Metrobus numbers came to be.”
Commuter Rail in DC’s Maryland Suburbs
Between August and September 2018, I wrote a series of four articles for Greater Greater Washington on the history of commuter rail in DC’s Maryland suburbs:
- “How the Washington Branch Railway and the Camden Line shaped the region’s suburbs“
- “How the Metropolitan Branch and the Brunswick Line shaped the region’s suburbs“
- “How the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad and the Penn Line shaped the region’s suburbs“
- “How long-abandoned railroads helped shape Maryland’s suburbs“
While DC was never a railroad hub like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, or Chicago—in part because it was not a major industrial city and so did not generate much freight traffic—it was served by both the Baltimore & Ohio and the Pennsylvania Railroads, both of which provided commuter service that has been continued by Maryland’s MARC commuter rail service.
In addition, the Washington, Baltimore, & Annapolis interurban line provided commuter service to Baltimore and Annapolis in the early 20th century, and passenger service was provided in southern Prince George’s County by the narrow-gauge Chesapeake Beach Railroad. I created maps showing the locations of stations on both the still-existing and long-abandoned passenger railroads in the Maryland suburbs of DC and examined schedules from the Official Guide to Railroads to compare historic service patterns to the service available today.
Historic Proposals for Rapid Transit in DC
Although planning for the Washington Metro did not begin until 1955 and the first stations did not open until 1976, proposals for a subway in the nation’s capital began during the rapid growth in the Federal government due to the New Deal and World War II.
In April and May 2019, I wrote a series of three articles discussing early proposals for subways in DC. First, I reported on the history a commuter rail subway that Waldo Schmitt (the Smithsonian’s curator of marine invertebrates) spent much of his life promoting. Schmitt’s subway would have connected Union Station to the B&O Railroad Georgetown Branch (now the Capital Cresecent Trail and part of the Purple Line right-of-way).
The next two articles in the series discussed more serious efforts by Congress and the DC government to build streetcar subways to reduce congestion in downtown DC during World War II. If the largest of these proposals had been built, it would have been twice the length of any other streetcar system in the US at the time. However, cost-cutting and a shift toward planning for automobiles led to the abandonment of these proposals. Instead, only a few minor streetcar grade separations were constructed, most notably an underpass with underground stations at Dupont Circle.
- “The saga of Waldo Schmitt, the crustacean biologist obsessed with building a commuter rail subway in DC“
- “Advocates have pushed for a subway in DC since FDR and WWII“
- “This 1944 proposal for a DC streetcar subway would have been the largest in the US“
In February 2020, I continued the series with a longer article on post-War proposals for regional rapid transit in DC: “The regional transit proposals that predated Metro, from express buses to monorails” (cross-posted at D.C. Policy Center). As part of this series, I created maps showing both Federally-sponsored proposals—the 1959 Mass Transportation Survey and the 1962 and 1965 National Capital Transportation Agency plans—and 1959 and 1963-1963 monorail alternatives proposed by streetcar magnate O. Roy Chalk superimposed over 1970 population density maps.
Baltimore’s Forgotten Guilford Avenue Elevated
My only two articles so far on the history of public transportation outside the DC region are about early elevated urban rail, and particularly Baltimore’s nearly-forgotten Guilford Avenue el. The Guilford Avenue el was an eight-block elevated trestle carrying a streetcar line above Guilford Avenue in downtown Baltimore, and included several stations, making it a true, if quite short, el.
In a pair of articles for Greater Greater Washington in July and August 2018, I discussed the history of the Guilford Avenue el, as well as four other obscure early elevated lines, in Sioux City, Hoboken, Kansas City, and Louisville. While the Baltimore el was the first elevated line built for electrified trolley cars, three of these other early elevated lines—built for steam trains or cable cars—were electrified earlier.
- “Baltimore once had an elevated streetcar along Guilford Avenue“
- “Did Baltimore have the first electric el?“
A number of books on the history of transit in Baltimore and the US in general were essential sources in writing these articles:
- Who Made All Our Streetcars Go?, by Michael R. Farrell is a detailed history of Baltimore’s streetcars, and seems to be the best source on the Guilford Avenue el. It was later republished as The History of Baltimore’s Streetcars, and may be easier to find under that title.
- Small Town Baltimore: An Album of Memories, by Gilbert Sandler has a short discussion of the Guilford Avenue el, although it gives a different list of stations (Madison, Monument, and Centre, but not Pleasant) than I found from aerial photos and maps.
- The Cable Car in America, Revised Edition, by George W. Hilton discusses the Kansas City and Hoboken systems, both of which originated as cable cars, in some detail.
- Cash, Tokens, and Transfers: A History of Urban Mass Transit in North America, by Brian Cudahy discusses the “prairie els” in Kansas City and Sioux City as a side note in a chapter on the Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Chicago els.