Parkersburg Streetcar and Interurban Trolley Line History
By
Larry Brian Radka
Parkersburg, West Virginia, like Boston and other U. S. cities, grew large enough to require horse-drawn trolleys in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
“The first trolleys were brought to the city around 1884—according to Parkersburg: An Early Portrait. “They were horse-drawn and not very dependable, and frequently they slipped off the tracks and into the muddy streets. Fortunately, these trolleys were replaced four years later by electric cars.”
They were much cleaner, especially since they did not leave piles of stench lying in the streets behind them. And, after all, by then almost every city and most small towns were beginning to build the faster and more efficient electric trolley systems to meet all the trains; so it seems that Parkersburg, with two B & O Railroad stations, could hardly allow itself to be an exception.
However, we find what appears to me to be a different account of the time of the establishment of horse-drawn and electric trolleys in Parkersburg—by the Central Electric Railfans’ Association 1968 edition of West Penn Traction. This renowned authority states:
In 1888, the Park City Railway was incorporated to build and operate a horse car line in Parkersburg. The Company was able to complete construction and begin operations in June 1889. The original roster listed two second-hand bobtail cars from Washington, D. C. As originally opened, the line extended from a turntable downtown at 7th Street out to the suburbs. Extensions were made during the next few years and by 1897 there were 10 horse cars in service.
Parkersburg’s horse railway was built while other cities were running their first electric cars, so it was natural that interest in the “broomstick cars” from Parkersburg developed early.
An exclusive electric or cable car franchise was granted to a “foreign capitalist” in 1894. No action was taken by the holder of the franchise. Public interest continued, however, as it appeared that the horse railway was going into a decline. It was reported in 1897 that service was being given only on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday and that the only riders were “little old ladies.”
The newspapers agitated for a new franchise all thru 1897. Finally in November, a proposition was sent to the city Council by a group of local businessmen.
The earlier electric car franchise was evidently repealed and on November 23, 1897, a franchise was granted to the Parkersburg Gas, Electric Light and Street Railway Company. The 50-year grant was not exclusive, and it limited the company to a 5-cent fare. The franchise and real estate of the horse car was purchased for $20,000 with the understanding that “service” would continue until the new system was constructed.
In consideration of possibly over quoting from this thorough publication, I will skip some of West Penn Traction's details. Let it suffice to say that the Association summed up this section of its early history of the establishment of trolleys in Parkersburg by eventually pointing out that “Early in 1898, construction began on two lines—the Inner Loop via Spring, Gould, and Lynn Streets and the Outer Loop via Gould Street to City Park. Construction was completed in time for an opening on July 2, 1898.”
This section and a close-up of Cram’s 1898 map of the Parkersburg area below shows the trolley routes which Wood Countians enthusiastically welcomed at the time.
Crowds of riders packed the two green inner-loop and two red outer-loop electric streetcars from 8 in the morning until midnight on the first day of their operation. About one third of the passengers crowded past the ticket-taker and rode free, but he still managed to collect 7,400 fares for day anyway.
The popular Parkersburg trolley system spurred on the construction of a power plant and a streetcar bridge (in the photo above) across the Ohio River in 1901—for the interurban line to run from Parkersburg to Williamstown and across the river to connect to the electric railway in Marietta, Ohio. After the companies on each side of the Williamstown Streetcar Bridge consolidated in 1902 and connected their traction lines in 1903, the new company, the Parkersburg Marietta Interurban Railway Company, would eventually extend its tracks to Beverly, Ohio, in 1909—and make it no further.
According to Parkersburg: An Early Portrait, eventually:
There were actually six trolley lines—two inner loops, two outer loops, one inter-urban and one Beechwood line. The latter was primarily for carrying workers to Beechwood Steel Mill. A seventh line was added much later in the North End. . . .
The inter-urban line, initiated in 1903, ran from Marietta to Parkersburg and connected with the outer loop at Pottery Junction (now Emerson and Murdoch). The trolleys were painted white and left Parkersburg every hour on the hour between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m., and every half hour from 8:30 a.m.
The Beechwood line ran to the Beechwood Steel Mill. In 1907, it was extended into south side across the East Street Bridge.
By the late 1920’s, when Viscose was built, the streetcar line linked it with the steel mill. The Beechwood trolleys were painted white. A later line, the Almeda, extended into North Parkersburg.
It met the outer loop at Terrapin Park.
(Photo Coming)
The streetcar headquarters was the Car Barn on 19th at Lynn.
“The South Side line later developed an extensive freight switching business, linking plants in the area with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad,” states West Penn Traction. “Ultimately, a locomotive was kept busy all day to handle the cars. Attempts were made to have box motors help the locomotive, but these failed and in later years a Baldwin-Westinghouse held down the job.
By that time, the line was known as the Viscose line from its principal industry.”
A railroad still operates a switching locomotive on the old B & O tracks today, but the rail line connecting the freight trolley has been for the most part dismantled.
Those old trolley rails once encountered other problems long ago, but they recovered. In the great flooding of Parkersburg by the Ohio River in 1913, many of the trolley tracks—like those under the arc light illuminating the trolley going to Fire Island, New York below—were completely covered with several feet of water but survived.
Reaching a crest of 56 feet, the waters flooded the city’s Market Street as far up as 5th and 6th Streets and Juliana above 7th Street.
Water covered Ann Street up to 9th and Murdoch was completely hidden under the water. On the Southside, the waters poured over Camden Avenue.
The city dried out well, and two years later the Parkersburg Marietta Interurban Railway Company merged with the Kanawha Traction & Electric Company—which then purchased new steel cars and its 22 city cars were changed to the prepayment type with pneumatic door controls.
Before the public could really digest these improvements in 1915, the Monongahela Valley Traction Company of Fairmont, West Virginia purchased the company for $4,000,000 in 1917.
No attempt was ever made to link its Parkersburg-Marietta trolley lines to the Monongahela Valley Traction Company lines that ran through towns to the northeast, such as the explosive coal camp at Monongah, West Virginia.
The new company name did not ring well with the people riding the Parkersburg trolleys because many were not very familiar with the Monongahela River, which was formed by the distant confluence of the Tygart Valley and West Forks Rivers at Fairmont, West Virginia—one of the State’s great coal-mining regions.
Up until 1919, the company’s safety record was apparently good. However, in that year one major accident occurred. One of its cars collided with a B & O switch engine. Its broken lines sprayed out steam that scalded 15 people to death.
Another, less catastrophic accident occurred on the night of May 1, 1920 when a mule stepped out in front of car 623 on a straight stretch of track near Glendale. The motorman, making a return trip to Parkersburg, applied the brakes, which reduced the impact of the collision. However, the mule was still crushed to death and the car plunged into a small ravine. Beside cuts and bruises, the crew and passengers, however, suffered no serious injuries.
In 1921, the meaninglessness of the name applied to the Parkersburg trolley company carrying Ohio Valley commuters grew. That was when the Monongahela Valley Traction Company became the Monongahela Power and Railway Company—a symbolic move by the corporation to emphasize the power and light aspect of the business.
To add insult to injury, the company name changed again in 1923—when the American Waterworks and Electric System purchased the company and changed its name once again to Monongahela-West Penn Public Service Company, a name completely remote to the Parkersburg area.
Electric trolley development reached its peak popularity about 1918. Thereafter, very slowly at first, but later more rapidly, traction companies fell into bankruptcy and their cars disappeared from the American scene. The Monongahela-West Penn Public Service Company’s Parkersburg-Marietta Division, however, survived the downward trend for a while and enjoyed considerable success. But eventually, it had to follow suit, and be trumped by the rising motor-truck freight hauling businesses.
The freight service on the Beverly line folded on October 1, 1929 and the Marietta carrier cashed in its cargo-carrying business and got out of the game in 1934. However, this service in the P-M division never lost money, even during the depths of the Great Depression, when the Parkersburg lines were still doing well in this department.
Nevertheless, after 1937, the curtains were definitely closing on the traction companies in the American trolley scene. West Penn Traction tells us that
The Public Utility Company “Death Sentence” law of 1937—one which the New Deal was quite proud—proved to be the death sentence principally for the traction properties.
In 1943, Monongahela-West Penn was forced by federal ukase to sell its traction properties.
The lines were purchased by a firm known as “City Lines of West Virginia.” Despite the name, no connection was ever traced to the nation-wide empire of the Fitzgerald brothers. Wartime restrictions prevented any move toward bus substitution, but as soon as restrictions were lifted, the owners embarked on a program of bus replacement.
Reporting on the Parkersburg Division of "City Lines of West Virginia" in the July 1946 issue of ERA HEADLIGHTS, Harold Geissenheimer wrote:
Here, the attraction is a suburban line up to Marietta, Ohio, which crosses the Ohio River on a long bridge. This line is mostly side of road and not very fast. Other lines included—a) the Viscose line, which is a fairly long line down to a plant of the Viscose Co. and several other factories. It has many sidings because of heavy rush hour traffic and also for freight switching—b) Southside line which is a short one car spur off the Viscose line and—c) the North End line, which is a single track loop serving a residential area. The town of Parkersburg as well as the electric railway is spotlessly clean and is a beautiful place to live. All of the cars have illuminated dashes such as many in Montreal have. They are orange with green trim.
The reprieve the traction companies enjoyed during World War II—when gasoline-fed vehicles ceased to be manufactured for private purchase and rubber tires and gasoline were rationed—ended after America declared vicotry. The release of government rationing and the pent-up demand for private automobiles that followed sent consumers on a buying binge, and their new mode of transport dealt the deathblow to most of those wonderful streetcars. Noisy smoke-belching gasoline-fed private automobiles, commercial trucks, and buses pushed the electric trolleys off their tracks and sent them rolling into the pages of transportation history.
In February of 1947, City Lines terminated Parkersburg’s North End line. In the June 1947 issue of Interurbans, The National Electric Railway News Digest, in reporting “on his recent extended trip,” the Editor wrote:
The following article is a summary of news items received from subscribers Russel Schram, Stephen P. Davidson, and Bob Richardson.
One by one the singing rails are disappearing from the famed West Virginia hills. The latest casualties are several of the lines of the old Monongahela West Penn Public Service Company, now being bussed by their purchaser, City Lines of West Virginia, Inc.
In February, two city lines, the North End Line in Parkersburg and the Edgemont Loop in Fairmont were replaced by buses.
On April 12, the last cars ran on the 14-mile interurban line between Parkersburg and Marietta, Ohio; and the 7-mile Wolf Summit line out of Clarksburg’s fine interurban terminal went out also. Car 629, originally built for the long-gone Marietta-Beverly line, made the final run on the Marietta line, leaving Parkersburg at 1:30 AM on April 26th; it carried 36 railfans and company personnel.
A couple of the 800 series cars whose runs ended at the Marietta end of the line were manned at Marietta and the three cars returned to Parkersburg together.
On May 26th of the same year, City Lines made the last run on the Viscose line along Camden Avenue, which operated from a loop in downtown Parkersburg to the Viscose plant across the Little Kanawha River and to the short South Side feeder line.
This photograph in color, like the others above, is made from a 35MM slide taken by Dr. H. R. Blackburn of Noblesville, Indiana; and it shows City Lines of West Virginia's car no. 629, the last for Marietta from downtown Parkersburg, leaving at 2 AM, April 14, 1947. Enthusiastic passengers packed into the trolley at this ungodly time of the night to enjoy one of the last trips made by this old electric chauffeur before their old friend whizzed down the rails into streetcar history.*
This photograph was introduced in an unrelated electric-trolley article in the August 1954 issue of Railroad Magazine:
Does anybody know exactly where this trestle was located? If so, click the "Contact Us" title near the bottom of the list of selections on the upper left side of this page, let me know, and I will add the information to this trolley-line Web page. Since the streetcars ran on rails covered up now by the pavement on the "Old River Road" running between Parkersburg and Williamstown, this tip may stir the mind of some old-time area resident who knows the location bridged by the "high trestle."
The old brick building with a slate roof above, now remodeled into a garage, may have once been a little interurban trolley station, but that is just my speculation. If anyone knows its history, please let me know. That would satisfy my curiosity and that of perhaps any other reader interested in Parkersburg streetcar and interurban trolley line history.
ILLUSTRATED NOTES
*The Editor of The National Electric Railway News Digest went on to add:
Since the abandonment, line crews have taken down the trolley wire but left some intact on curves at street intersections, and it’s still there. Track is being ripped up, the contractor tearing out good relay rail and leaving the worst rails in, so the abandoned line looks rather odd with here and there one or two rails or even a long stretch of track remaining intact. . . .
May 26th also saw the last run on the Viscose line, which operated from a loop in downtown Parkersburg to the Viscose plant across the river—and the last run on the short South Side feeder line.
Last cars were 800, 805, and 115 on Viscose, and 324 on the South Side.
Freight operations between B & O Yard and plants along the Viscose line will continue for the time being as the B & O is not ready to take over this switching; trolley loco 2000 will do this work with loco 654 in reserve.
Line car 700 will be kept temporarily. It is reported that the 654 (wood, steeple cab) has been sold to a strip mine operator and will eventually be used on his property near Clarksburg.
Above, we see a photograph of an old West Penn Railways locomotive, the type probably once used at Parkersburg in conjunction with the B & O Railroad shipping operations. Designated Locomotive No. 1, it should still be on display at the Arden Trolley Museum. It weighs 53,000 pounds, and was built by West Penn at Connellsville in 1916. Later it was converted to the broad trolley gauge—five feet, two and a half inches instead of the standard U. S. railroad gauge of four feet, eight and a half inches—and was used in interchange switching operations.
I hope you have enjoyed this brief look at Parkersburg streetcar and interurban trolley line history.
This page was last modified on Friday, August 20, 2010