[PRCo] Re: Politics of Traction Thread

[Donald Galt]

On 7 Aug 2001, at 9:10, Vigrass, Bill wrote:

> 
> There were many interurbans in the midwest that paralleled steam railroads.

Aha! I had foreborne to offer an example from the outlands, but here 
you are:

Consider the sad case of Puget Sound Electric Railway's Seattle-
Tacoma interurban. Opened to the highest standards in 1905 
between what were by far the largest cities in the area, it came 
eventually to offer one local and one express run hourly. Despite 
something like four miles of street running, the expresses covered 
the 32 miles in 70 minutes. (By contrast, the Sounder expresses 
today, running over a route 8 miles longer but stopping more than a 
mile short of downtown Tacoma, do the trip in 60 minutes.)

If any interurban could succeed, one should have thought it would 
be this one. Yet Stone and Webster closed it in December 1928, 
one of the earliest demises anywhere. Even the express steamers, 
whose traffic the interurban had severely impacted, continued to 
sail until December 1930.

What did in the line was the construction - and impending 
construction - of modern highways. But this was happening 
everywhere; it was happening in the territory of the sister Seattle-
Everett line to the north, which despite considerably more street 
running didn't close until 1939.

The PSER parallelled three steam roads for most of its length, 
though shorter by the abovementioned 8 miles. These saw quite a 
few trains daily, but nothing to compare with the schedule offered 
by the interurban, and only skeletal service to points along the way.

But there were only three intermediate towns of more than 1000 
population, one of them bypassed - by several miles - by the 
interurban's route. The wayside passengers were otherwise from 
farms and farming hamlets, and freight was from the beginning a 
major part of the line's traffic. For this it had to compete constantly 
with the steam railways, always at a disadvantage in terms of 
interchange.

The fact remains, it really seems that Stone & Webster bailed out 
early on this line, perhaps showing a prescience lacking elsewhere 
in the electric railway industry.

Don