The battle between St. Louis and Chicago to be the Midwest's leading city long predates the one between the Cardinals and the Cubs. Chicago won the fight to be considered part of the nation's first transcontinental railroad, and the Gateway City's delay in building a railroad bridge over the Mississippi River kept St. Louis in second place railroad service in the Midwest. But while Chicago had the Pullman Car Company, St. Louis featured more of the most important manufacturers in the rail industry, including American Car & Foundry and the St. Louis Car Company. St. Louis was dotted with historic rail structures ranging from its grand Union Station to depots built just after the Civil War, and a number of its suburbs were born of rail lines serving the area, with streets that still wear the names of the railroads they paralleled. In Trains and Trolleys of St. Louis, you have a ticket to hop aboard and travel across nearly two centuries through what the city built, operated, and preserved for the railroad. Hear the stories of the great-grandfathers who worked the rails, or take a walk down memory lane and a streetcar ride down to Gaslight Square. Local author and locomotive enthusiast Molly Butterworth carefully catalogues the history and significance of St. Louis' connection to its railroad days. Through the years, many of the railroad stations and streetcar stops have gone by the wayside, but their stories have lived on. Read about the ones you can still go enjoy, included in the many wonderful secrets shared among the pages of Trains and Trolleys of St. Louis.

This extensively illustrated, 240-page volume documents the long and colorful history of streetcar transportation in the city of New Orleans. This reprint of a 1965 volume, written by the two leading authorities on the subject, represents the complete work on the subject of New Orleans traction and urban railways. Featured are sections on early city transportation, and the golden era of electric traction (1893-1926), along with technical aspects, trackage, and mileage routes. A series of maps pinpoints, for traction enthusiasts, the locations of tracks no longer extant and provides information on companies that once operated the network of rails. Also included is a special section on the types of cars that were used throughout the traction era. Authors Hennick and Charlton also have collaborated on a companion volume to this work, Street Railways of Louisiana , also published by Pelican.

In the 1850s, Baltimore's 170,000 residents had few options when it came to getting around town. Before the decade's end, however, the omnibus--an urban version of the stagecoach--emerged as Baltimore's first mass-transit vehicle. Horsecars followed, then cable cars, and ultimately electrically powered streetcars. Recognizing the need for cohesion, the city's myriad transit providers merged into a single operator. United Railways and Electric Company, incorporated in 1899, faced the unenviable task of integrating routes being served by inadequate, incompatible, and often obsolete equipment. Over the next seven decades, privately run mass transit in Baltimore survived bankruptcy, a name change, two world wars, the proliferation of private automobiles, a takeover by out-of-town interests, and a plethora of new vehicles. Arguably a unified system of privately operated mass transit was no closer to being a reality in 1970, when it reached the end of the line and was taken over by the state.

The history of the St. Louis streetcar. It covers the cars, power stations, shops, carbarns, routes, services, and more.

Before skyscrapers and streetlights, American cities fell into inky blackness with each setting of the sun. But over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, new technologies began to light up the city. This text depicts the changing experiences of the urban night over this period, visiting a host of actors in the nocturnal city.