Twin Cities Rapid Transit

Being in Europe, and in Düsseldorf specifically, has prompted me to do a little bit of research. I have heard more than a couple of times some history regarding the USA's cable car systems of the 20s and 30s, and about how they were removed in favor of the automobile. I heard that the Twin Cities had a pretty well developed cable car system, and have seen the museum pieces from that era. What I did not know was just how large and well maintained the fleet was, and how sad the dismantling of it had been.

The Twin Cities streetcar system was called "Twin Cities Rapid Transit" or TCRT. It was a wide ranging bunch of trolleys and cable-cars that even included a few ferries and riverboats. The company was privately owned, and from the first rail line that was built in 1890, it was primarily concerned with re-investment in its own infrastructure, as any successful rail company need be. All the way through the second World War the lines were very successful, and the company was able to expand operations all the way out to My old stomping grounds in White Bear Lake.

After WWII, automobiles started gaining a lot of traction on the roads, and I had usually assumed that Americans simply stopped using the rail lines in favor of their cheap cars. In fact, TCRT was in the process of successfully upgrading its transit lines to a newer, faster standard to compete with the automobile when it was bought out. A Wall Street investor named Charles Green purchased the company and expected to turn an immediate profit, which of course went against the ingrained re-investment strategies of the company. He had the president ousted, took over control for himself, and started ripping out the rail lines in favor of bus routes, since they were cheaper to maintain in the short run.

As if this weren't enough of a forced death knell for the trolley system in MN, GM aggressively pursued its own bus sales, and rewarded the Twin Cities investors grandly with cheap buses for taking out rail lines. In the end, the rail system in the Twin cities was completely dismantled by 1954, only 5 years after Green took over.

This was not a gradual, natural decline that would have signaled a organic market-based move away from urban rail, this was a practiced aggressive move to destroy the rail system in the state. The controlling partners were so greedy when they took over TCRT, they even went as far as to burn all of the trolley cars as a quick way to dismantle them and get at the steel underneath. Their greed was eventually called to light, as they were convicted of various crimes for the actions, but not until well after the damage was done.

Wikipedia has a full-color painting of the TCRT's rail system from its peak in the late 1930s, which shows just how pervasive and well integrated the system was. Take a look at it. It is extremely frustrating to me that this infrastructure was removed, I can only imagine how useful such lines would be in the modern age. We are just now starting to rebuild our rail capacity in the Twin Cities, and the success of the new light rail line cannot be denied. Think about how much easier it would be to get around if we had been maintaining and expanding the system for the past 100 years, instead of starting from scratch only now.

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