Kansas City Streetcar Tech Revisited

Great coverage of local history as urban planners and tax fighters battle over the future of this old school transit . . . Take a look:

Kansas City's First Streetcars

Kansas City's street railway began humbly in 1869 with the advent of small, animal-drawn cars along rails laid in existing city streets. They were usually drawn by mules, which were more readily available, and the idea was to ferry people between the cities of Kansas City and West Port.

Comments

  1. why is that ol' SLY JAMES on that TOY TRAIN ????????

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  2. No. That's trolley boy in a previous life.

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  3. I bet the mules could outrun the present streetcar.

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  4. ^^I bet you failed a couple of grades in school.

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  5. .....needs to be sent to the mngmt. of the Corrigan Station.

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  6. One misstatement in the original article, the KC Streetcars didn't "flounder" in the 1950s, they were still carrying a normal number of daily passengers when General Motors bought the system and shut it down.

    Now, I'm not sure that mules could travel faster than what we have, but I know mules, and it's for damn sure that they wouldn't have any trouble getting the cars up the hills south of Union Station, something that's going to be a real problem for the technology that KC has chosen. If you research these units online you'll find they have only been successful in places that have relatively flat topography, In other words, the damn things can't go uphill!

    This is going to present a problem when the voters wishes are ignored and Sly and the Family Dumb go ahead (illegally) with the plans already in place and lay tracks out to the Plaza. The end result is that the entire system is going to have to be "replaced and upgraded" to handle these changes in elevation, at a cost at least four times what has already been announced.

    But Lordy, won't the "little white envelopes" roll into City Hall!


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  7. I'm not a fan of the streetcar, but I think they'll probably do fine on the hills. What about the streetcars of San Francisco with much steeper hills than Kansas City?

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  8. Nice to know it was a green city back then.

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  9. As green as the coal powered plant powering it

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  10. They should have been using the mule shit for energy. I guess they must have been using that at Arthur Bryants.

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