Posted: Mon, 8 Mar 2010 01:04 PM - 9,789 Readers
By: Austin American-Statesman
Getting There: Without a tax subsidy, streetcar operation struggled through most of its 65 years before ending in 1940.
You may not know that when an urban rail line opens here March 22, it won't be for the first time. Nor will it be the first time that glitches plagued getting such a thing up and running.
This earlier version, mind you, wasn't diesel-powered commuter rail or electric light rail, not at first. Austin began instead with what could be labeled "mule rail." As in, 12-seat streetcars towed by the sterile offspring of a donkey and a horse. Which was the source of the startup trouble in 1875.
A Col. John M. Swisher, now mostly lost to Austin history, in September 1874 managed to persuade the Austin City Council to grant him a franchise to lay track on Congress Avenue, Sixth Street and 11th Street. All were dirt streets at this point, and four months later the "system" was ready for a demonstration run. Perhaps the colonel was hasty.
According to a recounting of Austin's "streetcar era" in the October 1954 Southwestern Historical Quarterly by A.T. Jackson, the mule team got a little frisky making the corner at 11th and Congress. The unexpected centrifugal force caused the streetcar to tip over, spilling company and city officials into the dust.
Apparently, only dignity was bruised, and eight days later, the Austin City Railroad Co. was ready for another practice run. This time the car fell over four times.
Undeterred, Swisher initiated public service the very next day at a nickel a ride. (With inflation, that would be almost $3 today) Ownership later passed through a couple of Austin doctors, then to investors from Boston and Chicago, who bought the business in 1889 for $120,000.
It proved to be an unwise investment.
Enter M.M. Shipe, a real estate developer who had arrived from Abilene, Kan., only a couple of years before with $830 in his pocket. That was enough, somehow, to buy a large tract of undeveloped land well north of town, persuade the City Council to give him an electric streetcar franchise and, through borrowing, build five miles of rail featuring a line to what would come to be known as Hyde Park. Call it a $62,500 "railroad to nowhere."
Problem is, the mule cars were still a going concern, with parallel tracks on Congress just feet away from Shipe's new line. When the electric service began running in February 1891, customers on the competing streetcars literally were bumping elbows.
Austin, with a population of about 15,000, clearly wasn't big enough for two transit companies.
Which casts some suspicion on the fire at the mule stable just three months later. Thirty of the animals perished in the blaze, and 16 of the cars they had been pulling were destroyed. Weeks later, the two companies merged, and the mule service was supplanted by the electric cars.
What followed was 49 years of often financially troubled electric rail service, with lines into East Austin on East Sixth Street and what is now East Cesar Chavez Street; west on West Sixth Street and Dam Boulevard (now Lake Austin Boulevard) extending to the dams that seemed to keep washing out; north on Rio Grande, Guadalupe and Duval streets; and south on South Congress Avenue to Live Oak Street.
At the zenith of the Austin Electric Railway Co. (which went by other names as well), Austin had 23 miles of track.
But at a time when transit was not tax-supported and thus needed to make a profit, doing so proved elusive.
The operation fell into federal receivership twice, changed hands several times and faced competition from both "jitneys" (essentially bandit taxis that would pick up streetcar passengers before it could get to them) and, later, buses. The operation lost money in its first decade, in the years right after World War I and then again when the Depression hit.
Fare increases in 1920, to 7 cents a ride, and 1929, to 10 cents, couldn't reverse the trend. By 1939, the streetcar system was down to 17 miles, bus routes covered 29 miles, and residents had submitted a petition to the City Council complaining about the "hazardous, noisy and inflexible" streetcars on Rio Grande.
The end came on the sunny, unseasonably warm afternoon of Feb. 7, 1940. With Mayor Tom Miller and the Longhorn Band on hand at Sixth and Congress, the city held what Jackson termed a "celebration (of) the passing of the electric streetcars."
The band played "Auld Lang Syne," and about 500 people took a "sentimental journey" across Austin on several of the cars. By mid-afternoon, rail in Austin was done, replaced by "modern buses" and, of course, personal automobiles.
With World War II already raging in Europe and East Asia, and America's entry not that far away, scrap metal was becoming a valuable commodity. By June of that year, the city had ripped up most of the rails, selling them for $10.75 a ton to Austin Metal and Iron, and had paved over evidence that they had been there.
Jackson doesn't say what effect the lost transportation mode had on what by then had become a rubber-tired society. But he does quote one unnamed elderly doctor mourning rail's passing.
"I hated to see the streetcars stop running," the physician said. "It was so convenient for me to tell a patient to drink a glass of water every time a streetcar passed."
Perhaps an egg timer would have been cheaper.
