Word: trolley
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Zealots' Reproach. Born to a poor peasant 51 years ago in a remote Bihar village, Jaya Prakash Narayan never saw a trolley car until he was 19. When he won a government scholarship, the facts of Indian life crowded in on him all at once. He joined Gandhi's civil disobedience movement. Thirsty for learning but respecting Gandhi's boycott of the British-controlled universities, Narayan went to the U.S. to study. He worked his passage to California, got a job sorting fruit, began studying at Berkeley. During eight years in the U.S., he studied science...
...management, and it did not last long. The revolutions of 1914-18 came along, and rival generals commandeered the cars for use as troop transports, armored units or mobile-gun platforms. The equipment came out of the wars beat up and battle-scarred. By that time, buslines, paralleling the trolley routes, were cutting profits so drastically that the private owners of the trolley system could not afford to replace worn-out rolling stock. Worse yet, they were forced to entrust the battered cars to reckless motormen, who trundled them through the city like juggernauts. As a result, accidents were frequent...
Mexico City's 600,000 straphangers were elated last week when 41 new streamlined U.S. streetcars appeared on the trolley lines. With their usual facility for nicknames, they labeled the new cars clorofilos, for their light green color, and crowded aboard for test runs. The clorofilos were the first new cars placed in operation in more than a generation. Most of the city's 403 remaining streetcars are almost 50 years old. Many adult passengers have been riding the same cars all their lives, just as their fathers had before them. The ancient cars, a faded yellow...
...payment for $1,500 in subscription commissions, he got an interest in a monthly called Street Railway Journal, insisted from the start that trade magazines "have an educational mission . . ." But when he tried to educate his partners (e.g., the magazine must concentrate on the new electric trolleys), they argued that trolley owners would never give up horses and lose their profitable sideline selling manure...
...Chicago, frugal Anna Cox, 74, a street-corner peddler of notions, disclosed that her address for the past seven years has been the Chicago Transit Authority. When room rents went up, Anna Cox took to the streetcars at night. "A trolley's got a rooming house beat a mile for comfort," she said, "and it's a sight cheaper." She kept a change of clothes in a warehouse, freshened up in public toilets, lived on vegetables and fruit, always paid her full fare ($7.14 a week). "I don't sleep as well in a bed," she explained...