Who Really Killed the Red Car Trolley?

In the first half of the last century, sunny Los Angeles was crisscrossed with the tracks of an efficient, clean and cheap public transit system. You could go anywhere in the city quickly and without the worry of traffic and parking. Even the Crescenta Valley was served by its own electrified trolley line, the Glendale and Montrose Railroad. It was like some utopian dream. But starting in the 1920s and accelerating after WWII, the trolleys began to be replaced with buses and, in increasing numbers, individual cars. So what evil forces could have dismantled this amazing monument of engineering and replaced it with the choking traffic nightmare we have today? Who orchestrated this tragic regression? It was us, pure and simple. It was the free market that eliminated one of the best mass transit systems in the world.

I know I’m getting into controversy here. The Red Cars (the popular name for the Pacific Electric Railway) are one of the more romanticized aspects of old Los Angeles. This privately owned public transit train line encouraged the growth of L.A. by reaching ever further into the suburbs, eventually building 1,100 miles of track. It is popularly thought that “big oil,” along with the auto manufacturers, conspired to buy out and eliminate the electric trolleys in order to sell more cars. It’s a conspiracy theory that has bred adherents for decades and was introduced to a whole new generation in Disney’s “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”

But L.A.’s electric trolley system was established as a means to an end – the end being to develop and sell land. The simplified concept was this: Buy and subdivide large tracts of land far enough from L.A. to be bought cheap. Run a train line between the subdivision and job centers in L.A. Workers could buy the subdivided lots knowing that they had a reliable way back and forth to work. But once the land was sold and the money was in the pocket of the developer, the train line, which the developer owned, was an unprofitable albatross around the neck of the developer. Costly maintenance was deferred and, as autos became more prevalent, ridership declined.

The story of our valley’s own Glendale and Montrose Railway is a microcosm of the larger Red Car story. This small privately owned electrified trolley line originally served Glendale and Eagle Rock. In 1913 it was picked up by the developers of Montrose. They extended the tracks from Glendale to Montrose in order to make their development more valuable to land buyers who had jobs in Glendale or L.A. Once the land was sold, the developers in turn sold the line to other entities. One owner was a cement company that hoped the line would spur more sales of cement for new homes. Much of the line’s business was hauling freight for the housing boom of the ’20s. But ridership was declining as car ownership became more affordable for the average family. The line bled money while at the same time buses, cheaper to buy and maintain, cut into the railroad’s remaining passenger numbers. The Glendale and Montrose Railway went belly up shortly after the stock market crash of 1929.

And so went the Red Cars. In Angelino’s eyes, the unprofitable trolley lines could not compete with the convenience of car ownership. There were efforts made to keep the trolleys going with government support, but local voters rejected each measure to do so that was put before them. After the end of WWII, everyone bought a new car, further killing the trolley lines. As the system lay financially dying, conglomerates of oil, rubber and bus manufacturers began buying out chunks of trolley line, pulling out the rails, and replacing them with bus lines. (This is the basis of the conspiracy theory.) The remaining trolley lines were choked out by traffic from all the new cars, and by the early ’60s the trolleys were gone. The best mass-transit system in the nation was killed not by a sinister conspiracy by the oil companies, but by our own preference for the convenience of our cars.

  mike lawler