TUCSON is about to join the 'STREETCAR CLUB'

[Ocklawaha]

TUCSON, BTW, this type of station is WAYYYYYYY old school, it's called a safety island, and Jax was once full of them.


TUCSON, probably just median curbing and paving, but this is typical of the older safety island stops.


NEW ORLEANS, Tucson is nice, but it just doesn't have the funk or the nostalgic attraction of the Big Easy's 100 year old cars.

WANNA HAVE SOME FUN WITH NATE? Ask him about those new $600,000 dollar + buses and their 12 year FTA lifespan... Then remind him of this old friend. Wonder why I like the older cars? Let me count the reasons!

Market Street Railway Company
Built 1896 • Operational
SAN FRANCISCO streetcar No. 578 may be the world's oldest streetcar still on the active roster of an urban transit agency.


George Pleasant photo.
Built in San Francisco in 1896 by Hammond Car Co., the same firm that later built the California Street cable cars, this historic treasure is a bouncy single-trucker that was part of San Francisco's first generation of electric streetcars. It was built for one of the city's first streetcar lines, which ran from Golden Gate Park via Oak, Page, Devisadero (as it was then spelled), O'Farrell and Ellis Streets to reach Market Street. No. 578 was built when the line was extended across Market and down Fourth Street to reach the Southern Pacific train depot (trackage taken over by Muni's original F-Stockton line after World War II). No. 578's first owner was the original Market Street Railway Company, which was taken over by United Railroads in 1902. This streetcar survived the 1906 earthquake and fire, and soon afterward, when most of the other cars in its class were scrapped as obsolete, dodged destruction by being converted into a work car.

- See more at: http://www.streetcar.org/streetcars/578/#sthash.2WvRwAtb.dpuf

[thelakelander]

Great for Tucson. That's another city that is smaller than Jax that is leveraging transit investment for future economic gains.

[tufsu1]

Ock...I hate to tell you this, but the vintage streetcar revival is just about over....most cities are going the modern streetcar route...even Tampa is strongly considering switching to modern streetcar, or at minimum modern vehicles will be sued for future extensions.

[thelakelander]

Most cities are going with modern streetcars these days, in terms of mobility needs and appealing to the millennial generation.  However, there's no reason the two can't be mixed. San Diego runs a vintage streetcar and LRT on the same rails.

[Ocklawaha]

Exactly as I'd envision it in Jax..

And yes TUFSU1 it's slowed to a crawl not because of quality, but more because of availability of vintage equipment. Reproduction cars have likewise slowed somewhat, though there are a bunch of new Heritage Systems in planning stages. Some of the cutbacks are because of (sorry to tell on us as a group)"idiot consultant advice." Memphis being the star example in this, the consultants telling them they needed to install pantographs, and modern controllers, but they failed to advise circuit breakers, or emergency shutdown in their vintage fleet... They were told the modern controllers would serve them better then the old school system. The result was catastrophic and the system is shut down while they sort it out.


Who needs circuit breakers when you can do this???

Harvey Stone and I were recently talking about this over dinner in Hastings, before meeting with two different cities locally about heritage systems. He was pretty upset that they ignored experience in heritage systems (Harvey did Savannah's system). Kenosha is getting ready to expand theirs, as is Little Rock.

Memphis designed their downtown loop to handle modern light rail as well, but it was the car rebuild that totally screwed them.