[donybrx]

Happy Birthday to Scranton's electric trolley---nation's first----turns 120.
While the system stopped operating a while back..some of it is again running in the form of a trolley museum..with rides to Montage Mountain....

Interesting reading for transit buffs....


12/03/2006
First electric trolley delivered passengers in elegance


The "Electric City" was born 120 years ago, when the first all-electric trolley in the country made its debut.

On November 30, 1886, passengers boarded the trolley at the Academy of Music, opposite St. Luke’s Church on Wyoming Avenue, where they had been attending a lecture by renowned British explorer Henry M. Stanley. Readers may recall that Mr. Stanley discovered the long-missing Dr. Livingston in Africa. From the lecture, the excited passengers followed the route from Wyoming Avenue up Spruce Street past the new courthouse, onto Adams Avenue, up the steepest hill on the route, and on to the Green Ridge section, where the route ended. The trip cost 5 cents.

The Green Ridge section was then considered a suburb of Scranton, and the company named itself Scranton Suburban Railway Co. Passengers rode in elegance. The Pullman cars were the finest ever built. Measuring 16 feet, they seated 13 people on either side of the aisle. The front platform was enclosed, and the cars were painted a deep maroon. Passengers entered from the rear. The mahogany interiors were lit by incandescent electric lamps, another exciting new innovation.

The Dec. 1, 1886, issue of The Scranton Republican newspaper reported on the passenger trip: “The cars at times yesterday attained a speed of twelve miles an hour, but can be made to go much faster. It looks as though Scranton has solved the rapid transit problem.”

Scranton’s was not the first electric railway in the country, but it was the first one in the world built to run solely on electric power. In those early days of electricity, it was truly a marvel. The Dec. 18, 1886, issue of the journal Electrical World featured a story on it. The company was organized with Mr. Edward B. Sturges as president and Col. George Sanderson as secretary.

The men who organized and built the Suburban gave this city a much-needed and highly-touted innovation. Construction of the road for the new Suburban line was begun on July 6, 1886, and completed in Green Ridge in November. The railway system was equipped with its electrical apparatus by the Van DePoele Electric Manufacturing Co. C.E. Flynn installed the electrical equipment. The current was generated by a 60-horsepower generator. The motor was located on the front platform in constant sight of the driver, who handled the crank, turning the current on or off and regulating the speed of the motor. Cars traveled at a rate of between 4 and 15 mph.

The railway company paid a fee of $9 per day to the electric power company, and the cars ran along this route from 7 a.m. to midnight.

A trial run was made on Nov. 29, with Mr. Van DePoele himself at the controls and Mr. Flynn in charge of the motor. The test run showed slight defects in the system, which were quickly fixed, and the following evening’s passenger run was a success.

The electric cars were a great improvement over the horse-driven trolleys. Businessmen from Providence and Dunmore wasted as much as two hours traveling by horse-drawn trolley, along roads that were often rutted and muddy. In winter, snow delayed travel or made it impossible. The fare for a trip on the horse-drawn trolley was 25 cents.

From its initial Scranton to Green Ridge run, the electric trolley spread. The railway company once operated 110 miles of track in and around Scranton, and a passenger could hop a car every 15 minutes.

Sadly, the electric trolley system declined and then ended.

On Dec. 18, 1954, George Miller operated the very last trolley ride, taking passengers home to Green Ridge along the very same route taken by the first passenger run.

Cheryl A. Kashuba is assistant to the director of the Lackawanna Historical Society and co-author of the book “Scranton.”