Word: trolley
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Some 600 trolley and bus-line operators went to Chicago for an emergency conference of the American Transit Association last week. The emergency: too much business. How much too much, they heard from beetle-browed, mustachioed A.T.A. Managing Director Charles Gordon, who gave them some horrendous estimates for the next two years...
...this comes at the worst possible time, and the industry is stuck with a colossal lack of equipment. Only last September OPM actually curtailed new bus and trolley production. Since Pearl Harbor the bars have been lifted, insofar as A-3 materials priorities can lift any bar. But the 7,000 city-type busses now on order represent more than a full year's normal production...
...heart of this heart-rending problem is the trolley, which has for years been dying a lingering death both from bus competition and from that of the automobile. The rubber shortage would bring back the trolley, but the entire trolley-building capacity of the U.S. is no more than 2,000 cars a year.* Result: a mad rush to recondition old and abandoned cars, whatever the cost. Detroit's smart Fred Nolan, general manager of the Department of Street Railways (TiME, Aug. 14, 1939), despairing of the 500 new motor coaches he needs, is thinking of refurbishing 125 ancient...
Unhappiest city of all is Seattle, which embarked upon a fancy modernization program two years ago. Some of its trolley tracks were ripped up and sold to Japan for scrap, others were buried in new asphalt. Mayor E. D. Millikin is now frantically looking for funds to unbury what tracks he has left...
Motorists. In Philadelphia, police caught up with a speeding car that looked empty. Slumped down behind the wheel was the driver, who said he was keeping his bearings by watching the trolley wires. In San Francisco a judge fined a motorist $5 for straddling a white traffic line. The motorist was the painter who had put the line there...