Fourteenth and G, Washington, D.C., Summer of 41

Abstract

Fourteenth and G, Washington, D.C., Summer of ‘41 Robert C. Post (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Repairing trolley track. (Capital Transit Company photo.) In virtually every city and town that had electric streetcars, trackwork was a straightforward part of construction and maintenance. It consisted of rails spiked to wooden crossties, with everything but the surface of the rail and the flangeway usually paved over; replacement merely involved digging up the pavement. More complicated was the system of power distribution via overhead wires. These were typically attached to cables spanning the street between poles on either side. They drew current from an insulated feeder strung from one pole to the next, and cars in turn picked up current by means of a spring-loaded device called a trolley with a small wheel bearing up against the wire. Occasionally it was different, in great cities such as New York, Paris, Marseilles, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Vienna—and in Washington, D.C. There, overhead wires were prohibited as an aesthetic blight. This necessitated designing street railways with the feeders and contacts routed through conduits beneath the surface. There were no crossties. Rather, support was provided by iron yokes set in concrete at five-foot intervals and cars were equipped with pickups called “plows” that projected from the rear truck through a slot between the tracks. Only in a few outlying areas were conventional trolley wires permitted—on Wisconsin Avenue above P Street, for example. Where there was an interface between underground and overhead pickup systems, workers were stationed in pits to affix and detach plows. Maintenance of overhead trolley wires was always fussy, especially at intersections and curves, but dealing with even the most complex situations was easy compared to what conduits entailed. Routine demands were relentless, both in summertime when plows would get stuck because slots pinched together and in winter when ice and snow could wreak havoc down inside. And renewing trackwork was a truly formidable undertaking, as this 1941 photo suggests. The location is 14th and G Streets NW, an [End Page 729] intersection between lines operated by the Capital Transit Company, which also had a set of connecting tracks. Laborers can be seen both above and below the surface. While the design of the conduit system is not fully evident in this view, what’s visible is suggestive of astonishing complexity. Note, however, that there is not one wire to be seen anywhere. And note, too, that streetcar service continues in the midst of all the disarray; there was no possibility of using temporary “shoofly” track, as with overhead-wire systems. The car coming toward the camera is headed for Pennsylvania Avenue and ultimately for Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill. This car had been built by the Jewett Car Company of Newark, Ohio, thirty years before, and looks distinctly old-fashioned. The other car is headed north for its terminus at 14th and Colorado, to the east of Rock Creek Park. It looks modern, and in fact it was just a couple of years old in 1941, among the first of Washington’s President’s Conference Committee (PCC) cars, a standardized type developed by a consortium of transit operators. The St. Louis Car Company had been delivering batches of PCC cars to Capital Transit each year since 1937, and except for 1943 would continue to do so until 1946. During the war, Capital Transit would be largely exempted from War Production Board restrictions on new acquisitions, as Washington’s population burgeoned and streetcar patronage more than doubled to 336 million annually. With equipment that was mostly aged (there were 149 cars just like No. 712), and with exceedingly heavy demands on the system’s overall capacity, the company needed new rolling stock, and the PCC filled the bill admirably. It was stylish, quiet, and technologically advanced, and it appealed to management for another reason as well. In 1936, the District of Columbia Public Utilities Commission had revised an ordinance requiring both a motorman and a conductor aboard every streetcar; henceforth, the company would be permitted to operate cars “of superior design” with just a motorman. While these cars were naturally less costly to maintain...