Quote:
Originally Posted by hammersklavier
Well, if you're going to add trolley subways, you might as well add Providence, Los Angeles, San Francisco(?), and possibly a few other cities as well.
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In the case of San Francisco and Providence, the tunnels were built to avoid steep hills, not
really to turn the streetcar systems into subways. Both tunnels return to grade as soon as it becomes practical to do so. Neither tunnel has stations in it.
LA is kind of a special case, but it did have an underground terminal station, so I guess that counts.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Boston, too, didn't have a subway system until later. The original portions of the T were all trolleys that happened to have a downtown tunnel.
Boston added heavy rail later on, with the Red and Orange lines.
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Absolutely not true. The Red Line (originally called the Cambridge Subway) opened in 1912 and was a fully grade-separated subway akin to the one in New York. Boston also had fully grade-separated elevated lines even earlier, although all elevated trackage has since been shifted underground (with the exception of the short stretch of track around Charles/MGH).
Also, if you're gonna nitpick about Boston's Green Line, you should probably also throw out Chicago, where major stretches of the Douglas (Pink), Ravenswood (Brown) and Lake Street (Green) Lines were built at-grade with level crossings. The Green Line was elevated in the 1960s, but the other two remain.
Chicago's rolling stock is also streetcar-length and weight, because of the tight junctions and turns required on the elevated structures. Of course, the IRT has the same car length, for the same reason.
It's one big continuum, really... there's as much difference between the Chicago L and a modern metro like DC's, as there is between the Chicago L and a streetcar system.