A Look Back at The Pacific Electric Railway
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ก.ย. 2024
- The Gold Line Foothill Extension to Azusa has officially arrived, but it's not the first time electric rail carved a path throughout the area. More than a century ago, electric rail made SoCal its home.
Thank you very much Cloverleaf for buying Pacific Electric and closing it down line by line.
The same mistakes were made in the UK with trams being abandoned in favour of buses, and later cars. The same applied to the railways. Wholsale abandonment of branch lines, and some main lines, took place across the UK in the 1950s through to the 1970s. Today there's a scramble to build tramways and re-open some branch lines where the right of way hasn't already been built on. The rest of Europe didn't act in such haste.
Saw a show on PBS about train travel in the UK. It identified a Dr. Richard Beeching as the dastard responsible for the devastation of the British railway system.
Very impressive documentary!
Let's bring back trains. Vote yes on M!
Me too
The Pacific Electric was not built with tax money, but rather private capital.
It's already happening my friend
Great, LA had one of the best railway systems in the world, went to the all bus and the roof caved in.
So True!
Buses in L A are too slow and never punctual
That was great fun to watch.
Fascinating. I'm sharing this.
Nicely done.
Amazing history.
The red car needs to come back. Big mistake removing it because look how back traffic jams are now
so true !!
@@johnyguerrero5120 I am so glad that Metro is extending it's current rail system. We still have the current Blue Line, Expo line, Gold line, Red line, and Purple line but Los Angeles will continue to expand these lines. Currently the Regional Connector is still under construction and it won't open until 2022. The Purple line extension will open in the year of 2023. We still have a long way to go with the rail system here in Los Angeles.
I agree 💯 with you!
@@Hotters9060hopefully you guys will get more going in time for the Olympics in 2028, but hopefully it’ll be a good design that lasts.
I think LA Metro is an Indirect descendant of Pacific Electric railway (Radial lines-Green, Gold, Blue and Expo) [3rd Rail lines Red and Purple] as mentioned in Wikipedia
I grew up in Westminster in the late Sixties through the Seventies. Never knew about the Red cars, although I must have seen remnants of it in Huntington Beach. I vaguely knew about the Yellow cars because the tracks were still there for years in the roads after they stopped running. My parents moved to LA the last year of the Yellow lines before I was born, didn't realize until recently the trains were still running in my lifetime, if only for a few months.
nice educational video
The Pacific Electric shared the same fate as all the streetcar and interurban lines of its time. Profits were rather small, there were numerous costs associated with infrastructure and labor. It was also tied to Southern California Edison. The automobile provided people with a faster, cost effective, and more reliable form of transportation. That is why GM was able to eliminate the PE. I am also sure there were people who hated the Big Red Cars, Big Railroads, and Big Power. There are people who hate the large hydroelectric plants that powered the PE. Investors and utility magnates funneled a lot of money into the interurban railroads, hoping to keep them running. In the end the Great Depression sealed the fate of the interurban railroads, and several utility executives either lost everything or ended up in prison.
Can't we invest in both!? Why does it have to be an either or scenario? What you have been proposing is massive subsidies for trains whilst ignoring roads and airports and then claim airports and roads can't pay their own way.
Technically the Pacific Electric actually lost money for most of it's operational life. What you have to remember is that most passenger trains have high capital costs but narrow profit margins which means that they are likely to accrue a lot of debt (this is what killed a lot street car and interurban railways in the mid 1900's). It is also worth remembers that neither the original Pacific Electric or the Pacific Electric that existed after 1911 were a single company building tracks, rather the PE was a Lovecraftan monstrosity assembled by a series of buyouts and mergers. At the end of the day the PE was left with an interest bill of over 3 million 1911 dollars. As a result of it's 48 years of operation only 8 were actually profitable despite the fact that not accounting from interest the PE only took a loss 6 years.
According "ride the big red cars" by Spencer Crump
Wow! I did not know this and I grew up in Glendora in the 50’s, 60’s , and 70’s .
Wonderful video, even talks about the Azusa branch i was curious about. The PE was vastly superior to the light rails we have now. Classy, nice looking, had real stations, safe, and went most of the places you needed to go. I am glad we do have the light rails we have now as they are better than nothing, but they are junk compared to the PE.
@Craig F. Thompson Metro should have made replicas of the original Pacific Electric trains.
@Craig F. Thompson But now we have the current light rail cars and I am glad that they are extending each line. Los Angeles is building the new Regional Connector which is going to connect the Blue line, Expo line, and Gold line together. The Regional Connector is set to open in 2022.
@Craig F. Thompson The Regional Connector was supposed to open in 2020 but I don't know what is the delay. I was excited to ride the Regional Connector but it is taking forever just to open.
The Pacific Electric was a regional carrier, more important were the Yellow cars of the Los Angeles Railroad, these were the trains that actually ran of the streets in downtown LA and radiated out into the surrounding communities, it was the Yellow Cars that allowed people to live in the suburbs around LA and commute to downtown to work and shop without a car. If we are ever going to supplant the automobile as the primary commuter device, it's the local city street line services that need to be replicated as well.
Pretty good video. And it means something special...if you live in Glendora.
Wow this great must’ve been nice to travel from downtown To Mount Lowe we’ve downgraded bad but hopefully that’ll return soon
Correction: PE extended as far east as San Bernardino & Riverside.
Redlands actually.
The scene at 2:54 is my California dream. What a paradise it was back then.
glad to see construction has started from azusa to montclair..
Bring that back
they should just put the interurban's back were they were instead of somewhere new
I actually live right next to where a part of tracks were.
Too bad ,We need more trains instead of less.More light Rail.!
Helpful video to remember that Greater Los Angeles was NOT "always a car culture".
Extension to Montclair was cancelled. Pomona is the permanent terminus now
look how all the modern footage has damn cars crawling all over everything
as usual the media gets it "SORTA" right....for beginners they were the big red car"S"
Funny how So Cal had all this back 100 years ago. then tore it all up then put it back. Uncanny ain't it?
The movie named Who framed Roger Rabbit got me excited about the trolleys and especially those trams of the late Pacific Electric Railway (although in real life they weren’t exactly like that in the movie because they were more like train than buses like that though some probably ran that way in the middle of the highway) and maybe just that as those kids and Eddie sat on the wide rear bumper of that tram.
I would like to tell you, especially as a Finnish representative, that if I were a multi-billionaire with huge assets like Elon Musk, for example, I would travel to Los Angeles with the person in charge of these deceased companies and buy the traffic and copyrights of Pacific Electric Railway to I could rebuild, repair and thus reopen it, thus bringing back the former "best public transport in the world" back to Los Angeles and bringing it to my home country of Finland, to further improve our public transport even though it is actually the best in the world at the moment, education, health and equality in addition.
And I'll set it up so that the trams will be exactly the same as in this movie: similar in shape, size and design, albeit a bit more modern, with wide front and rear bumpers so that kids and adults like the kids and Eddie in that movie can themselves pick up and sit there. on top of them and travel, travel on trolleys in this way for free, and they drive on the rails embedded in the middle of the highway as seen in the film, although the trams also have to be built back, you can buy a ticket on the spot from the ticket seller like Eddie did ( pay for it either in cash or by card and I promise the price is nickel) or some kind of Pacific Electric app created for checking schedules and buying a ticket with a smartphone and terminal stations like in a movie, i.e. includes a waiting room and a bar, restaurant, though I'm going to set them up e so that children may also visit them, where snacks, coca-cola and other soft drinks and other delicacies are sold to children and teenagers where restaurant food and beer are sold to adults.
And I would invest both millions and billions of dollars and euros in the company's cash and cash equivalents on both the American and Finnish sides so that it would not have to be sold in cash to any company for financial difficulties, at least not immediately or at all if the money is kept as emergency and spent reasonably not almost any of them actually go away.
And before my death or possible resignation, I would make sure that the company is never, for whatever reason, or no matter how good the offers made by other companies, sold to any other company or entity so as not to be abused or liquidated again for one reason or another. don't get to repeat yourself.
That if I got the Pavific Electric Railway, even after it was liquidated, I would bring it to life, bring it back to the world map and inspired by the film alone :)
Nice video but the music gets to be a little repetitive and annoying after awhile.
7:12 end of track location if you would like to see it!
34°08'14.1"N 117°54'37.8"W
3:24 a round trip from Downtown LA to Monrovia was 50 cents round trip back in 1903? Adjusted for inflation, that'd be over $13.50 today --- I'm not sure how "cheap" it really was.
extrapolate the cost of not having to own a vehicle, monthly payment, insurance, registration, repairs, fuel & maintenance, it seems reasonable.
I think that was for a ticket book for a certain period of time. I've read where the trains were low cost for the most part. There were always issues, however, between the company and area governments over who would pay what and how much. The auto makers ganged up on the PE with the gas companies and ran them out of town. PE was best as semi-long haul commuter network and should have remained in business to continue in that roll while the bus service handled travel around the city.
Actually, that is roughly the same price for a roundtrip Metrolink train going a similar distance. Not so bad considering what you get, actually.
"extrapolate the cost of not having to own a vehicle, monthly payment, insurance, registration, repairs, fuel & maintenance, it seems reasonable."
Even with the railways, most people were simply not going to not use cars. There were decades of overlap of both the railways and motor vehicles being available, and most people picked both, or just the automobile. Electric railways led practical automotive transportation only by about twenty years, at best. Most electric railway investors would not have bothered if they had seen that coming, especially the ones behind PE.
"I think that was for a ticket book for a certain period of time. I've read where the trains were low cost for the most part."
Ticket books or long term passes are like buying in bulk, therefore the idea is that they would cost LESS than an individual ticket. If individual rides averaged to $0.50 on a monthly pass or whatever, that's still high.
"The auto makers ganged up on the PE with the gas companies and ran them out of town"
No, it was really just paved roads, which the land developers who founded PE themselves advocated for and built out of their own pocket as they subdivided land.
too bad they don't run any vintage equipment
You can ride them at the Southern California Railway Museum in Perris, CA
Automobile s were Fantanstic way to conduct everthing you needed to do. Riding a train is like detention in the Principle office. Stupid rules timelines late arrival s and boredom
glendora news explinatation that pe was draining southern ca edison of power for the closing of the pe was a very lame excuse . sce was created for powering the pe. please read (if you can get a copy ) the book called the railroad that lighted southern california. i forget the author. real reason , a industrial conglermate bought them up so they could sell cars and we are in the mess that we are into today. im glad that metrolink and light rail is doing well.
Uni Pacific?? You Mean Union Pacific.
Thanks to General Motors for screwing up ALL interurbans and bus companies.
I agree with 100%
В угоду автомобилистым автомобилистам и нефтеторговцам уничтожили удобный транспорт. Это т.н. рыночная экономика!
PACIFIC ELECTRIC WAS KILLED BY CORPERATE GREED !
I agreed with you 💯
LA is involving…. go back to the passed !
Electric cars also destroy the environment through resource mining, manufacturing processes and ultimately going to the landfill in mass droves. The pollution they cause is simply unnecessary as is the amount of urban space squandered on parking and other paved over autocentric wastes. They also perpetuate urban sprawl, the food deserts that come from that invariably, along with cities that are not navigable as a pedestrian or bicyclist and are, in fact, inhospitable to humanity. They add to traffic congestion. Putting the financial burden of transportation inefficiently and directly on the individual citizen is simply not wise or fair and hasn’t been the norm for even 80 years. We need to invest in commuter rail that’s properly implemented as it typically is overseas. The American people are apathetic through decades of disenfranchisement and a lot of that marginalization (eg Robert Moses’s racist urban renewal) is through divestment of public infrastructure, utilities and programs to help the American people. Public works improving life for the taxpaying citizenry materially will bolster civic pride. We need to know we have a future and an equitable shot at thriving. Transcontinental High Speed Rail should integrate seamlessly with commuter rail networks so it can evenly function as one cohesive system and this will convert flyover country back into a thriving heartland by functioning as an artery of commute and commerce which will reduce clustering on the coasts. Similarly, wholly integrated circuits of commuter rail blended with interurban routes, light rail lines, street car networks, subways, and even trolleys would prevent people from having to live on top of each other in city centers in order to have quick access to urban cores and downtown areas so this would stimulate our local economies and prevent gentrification from demolishing cherished heirlooms of our historicity, destroying our classic neighborhoods, shredding the fabric of our communities and toppling our civic landmarks and architectural heirlooms along with other social capital such as venerable culture generating venues. Numerous studies show that homogenously bleak and bland duplitecture that profiteering developers build for the profits of themselves and corporate slumlords not only causes homelessness from being financially inaccessible to most Americans, but also causes depression from creating such a devastatingly depressing, unloving urban habitat that’s too congested and overcrowded to work properly as a correctly engineered built environment. Our roadways are overcrowded and no amount of widening them and adding lanes will do anything to help it because it just leads to induced demand that inevitably grinds to a halt at snags and bottlenecks down the road. Shouldn’t American cities be thriving centers of culture and character rather than austere and chintzy morasses of mediocrity? I believe that we can build back better and that we also must for America to have any sort of a bright future ahead of it. Right now we are mired in the destruction of our cities from the inward attacking neocolonial oppressors who weaponize their clout of wealth against the nation for their own off-shore un-American gains of privileged, parasitic, private profits. This greed fueled anti-social exploitation is present day feudalism driving us into another gilded age. Tons of new petrochemical building “luxury living” housing units remain empty serving only as financial assets in investment portfolios of hedge fund and permanent capital firm cretins instead of as direly needed shelter for humans. We deserve a landscape we can be proud of and country should come first before corporate looting and exploitation. Legacies are important and live on forever. With space opened up in our cities we could rebuild beloved structures gone from economic and environmental disaster utilizing new technologies such as hempcrete and 3-D printing. We could create vertical farms etc. on spots currently now just serving as paved over squares and nothing more. We can extend democracy into offering the taxpayer residents democratic say in what their city consists of, how it looks and how it operates promoting civic engagement and participation. We need a new day rising!
oh yeah no insurance not have to pay for gas no traffic no speeding tickets have to deal with assholes sometimes maybe a few stinky folks
LOL "a few stinky folks".. no thanks!
A look back at the future. A sorry tale of greed and power.
Although I like trains, there is a reason people prefered cars... it's called personal transportation, set your own schedule, door to door, etc. Going back to 'streetcars' is an admission that life today in big cities is WORSE than it was 50 - 100 years ago as far as transportation convenience. These "modern" streetcars are going to be albatrosses in 10 - 15 years as self-driving cars mature and become the preferred transportation mode for virtually all urban transit. It's why Uber is way more popular for people without cars then even the best bus system is unless you literally live ON the route. And when you set aside the massive subsidies given to mass transit, self-driving cars will be far far more economical.
Interesting video, but hard to listen to because of the horrible, horrible music!
Nicely done.
As an amateur historian and reader of books by Crump and others, I find this video accurate. Thanks for mentioning that more revenue was made via hauling freight then passengers and the bridge across the San Gabriel River and the rails being stamped from the time period. Good short documentary. Thank you!
If history books are saying the red car PE trolleys were losing money but all your pics show the rail passenger cars filled with riders?
What does that tell us? ANYONE CAN BE BOUGHT FOR THE RIGHT PRICE INCLUDING US!
One of the issues was that it was over leveraged. In "ride the big red car" the author shows a chart opperating profits/losses and of the later pe's only pulled a profit 8 of 48 years though they only took an operating loss for 6. That's because interest and taxes were costing over 3 million dollars in the 1912 and remained over 900 thousand in the eary 50's.
its far too painful to see how they destroyed and gutted the entire system, that decision alone doomed southern Californias' efficiency, and the bike trails are the final nail in the coffin to any hope of bringing back these routes. Sure you can build new Metro track on a different right of way, but it would be away from houses, which kinda takes away from the convenience that the red car gave