Last Day for Trolleys

[jon]

I know some of our members are great electric bus fans. In Edmonton, they are known as trolley buses, or just trolleys.

Today is their last run, thanks to a unexpected City budget shortfall.

Trolleys’ last stop on road to oblivion
Supporters mourn decomissioning of fleet
2 May 2009
Edmonton Journal
GORDON KENT

An Edmonton transit service that has operated for almost 70 years will reach the end of the line today when the final trolley is taken off the road.

Following years of debate, city council voted last spring to phase the trolleys out by April 2010 and use an expected $100 million in savings over the next two decades to buy 47 extra hybrid buses instead.

But councillors decided this week to move up that timetable by a year and immediately decommission the entire fleet to shave $756,000 from the cash-strapped 2009 budget.

Just 24 of Edmonton’s 37 aging trolleys, which date from 1982, are still in active service, said Dennis Nowicki, Edmonton Transit’s director of community relations.

Although there had been seven trolley routes, the only one still running is No. 3, between the Jasper Place transit centre and the Cromdale loop at 115th Avenue and 82nd Street, he said.

“After council’s decision last year, they started decommissioning some of the lines,” he said.

“Then you would have some lines that, with construction season upon us, were not in operation.”

The inability to manoeuvre trolleys, attached by a pole to overhead lines, around roadwork and other traffic congestion, was one reason transit officials recommended getting rid of them.
They also argued that trolleys, running on expensive, unsightly wires along a small number of routes, were too costly and inefficient to save.

But many passionate supporters, who fought to keep what’s described as Canada’s longest continuously operating trolley system, contended the vehicles are quieter and cleaner than diesel buses, and the price of electricity is likely to be more stable than oil.

Vancouver is the only other Canadian city still using trolleys and has recently modernized its fleet.

Coun. Don Iveson, who wanted to retain the vehicles, is still unhappy they’re on the road to oblivion.

“The outcome was prejudged and that remains a great disappointment to me as an elected official, that a case was brought to us with a predetermined conclusion.”

On his blog (doniveson.ca), the councillor says the city administration didn’t propose cheaper ways to operate trolleys, such as putting more vehicles along less than the 127 kilometres of wire now being maintained. “This sad failure is why trolley supporters, including a number of us on council, will mourn the decommissioning of this remarkable aspect of Edmonton history.”

Edmonton Transit plans to keep one of the vehicles for its historical display and is talking to the Reynolds-Alberta Museum in Wetaskiwin about putting one in its collection, Nowicki said.

The fate of the others hasn’t been decided, he said.

“The city will explore any option for surplus if there are any parties interested in acquiring the vehicles.”

[jon]

I will say this much for Edmonton Transit: as Radiofan can confirm from his viewing last Autumn, Edmonton Transit does a great job of preserving its history of vehicles. So, I'm sure there will be representative examples of each model of "trolley" kept in fully restored condition.

When I moved here in 1975, ETS as it was then known, bragged about having some 1928 model trolley buses still in service. I know that seems to contradict the "almost 70 years of service" comment in the article but, during the Depression, I'm not surprised that ETS bought used buses. Hey, they may not even have been used. They could easily have been manufactured in 1928, and sat in a manufacturer's warehouse, brand new, through the entire Depression.

Update: Wikipedia.org says that ETS began trolley bus service on 24 September 1939. A demonstration was made in 1887 in Nantasket Beach, Massachusetts, so trackless trolleys were certainly not new.

[cdl]

I remember moving to Edmonton as a 10-year-old in 1960. Our family lived on the corner of 114 street and 74 avenue, in the Belgravia community. South of our home was farm land. To go downtown we would walk to 76 avenue to catch the S1 trolley. I remember the trolley rides being pleasant experiences, everyone behaved and respected their fellow riders. It was the time of "Leave It To Beaver." I miss those days with my family. I will miss the trolleys.

[jon]

cdl: I don't know if you will see the irony or not. But the death of the trolleys of which we speak, yesterday, comes just 6 days after an LRT station opened at exactly the same intersection where you caught your S1 trolley bus in 1960.

Given that the LRT (Light Rail Transit) is really just a modernized Street Car system, and that trolley buses were intended to expand and perhaps even replace trolleys, because they didn't need tracks, it just interesting to see the six day overlap of old and new.

Unlike the LRT, which runs North-South up and down 114 Street, the trolley line ran West along 76th Avenue. I don't drive along 76 Avenue much, so I'm not sure if the trolley wires are still there. I know they were still there a few years back.

The story of the route numbering system in Edmonton is an interesting one. Especially if my theory is correct.

I've never been a fan of Technology ruling People, rather than vice versa, but I believe this is one case where it did. Around the beginning of 1976, ETS/Edmonton Transit confused pretty much everyone who took a bus in Edmonton by changing almost all of the route numbers. Only the small number of numerical route numbers remained. Routes like the S1 that cdl mentions, where S=South, became numeric. 41 as I recall.

I knew the guy who wrote the first computer software for Edmonton Transit. He was a nice guy, but very mathematically/stats-oriented. He used the University of Alberta's academic computer system, for which I worked at the time. I ran the Help Desk, so I got to talk to him a lot.

Although we ran an IBM mainframe computer system, the operating system was not IBM's, but was written at the University of Michigan. It had this easy to use type of file called a Line File. The name derived from the fact that you had direct access to any line of the file just by specifying its line number. In those days, most files on other operating systems required you to read the entire file just to find one line. Making changes to a line generally meant you had to recreate the entire file! With Line Files, you just replaced a line directly.

He used the Edmonton Transit bus route number as a Line Number in a Line File. It is my belief that he talked Edmonton Transit into all numeric Route Numbers so his computer system could directly use Line Numbers without having to translate Route Numbers with letters in them.

[cdl]

Jon: I'm well aware of the historical significance of the location where I used to board the S1 bus. As you mentioned, an LRT station (McKernan/Belgravia) is there now, across the street form McKernan Elementary Junior High, which I attended for six years. The City of Edmonton bought my parents' home for LRT access several decades prior to the first train passing over the land where once a fertile garden grew. If my father were still alive, I know he would have made a pilgrimage to McKernan last weekend for the opening of the new LRT station. I'm filled with bittersweet memories every time I travel along 114 street, in the Belgravia and McKernan communities. Those were the days, my friend . . .

[Dan Sys]

The only North American cities now left with an operating trolley bus fleet are Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Dayton, Cambridge (Massachusetts), several routes in suburban Philadelphia, Mexico City, and Guadalajara. I'm not aware of the status of the Mexican systems, but all U.S. & Canadian cities mentioned above have recently upgraded their systems including new rolling stock, so trolley buses will still be around for at least a couple more decades on this continent. Several years ago Portland (Oregon) and Salt Lake City were considering reverting back to trolley buses, but I haven't heard any updates on those proposals.