Sunday Video: The PG County Trolley Trail, before it was a trail

I feel like I posted this before. I lnow I've seen it before. Still, it's a cool little video. great shots of old cars, like the one passing in front of the camera at the 6:07 point - and there's the old Rambler dealership at 6:56. What could be considered the beginning of the trail right of way, picks up at around . Mt. Ranier Circle is at 5:50.

Is that the bridge over the NW Branch at 7:40? 

Comments

[Purple Eagle]

This (or a similar clip) was on GGW a few weeks ago . . Maybe that's where you saw it?

[Christopher Fotos]

Love this clip and I've watched it a couple times all the way through at GGW--IIRC there are supposed to be others by the same guy. Helpful to see there were always insane drivers.

[washcycle]

I re-saw it on GGW, but I had previously seen it elsewhere. There was a time when I was massively researching streetcars in DC (and I wrote much of the wikipedia entries on washington, dc streetcars as a result) so that I could see if there were rail trail opportunities that were not being pursued.

[contrarian]

I recall reading that when the streetcar was running, NY Avenue was half the width that it is today, it was tree-lined with a median and the houses along it had front yards. The kicker: it was used by several times more people on a daily basis than it does today.

Then in the 1960's they tore up the streetcar tracks, eliminated the median and took away the front yards of the houses along the avenue. That part of the city has never recovered, look how much more inviting the neighborhoods look in this film.

[Resident]

I noticed that the streetcar is about twice the size of the cars on that road. The streetcar looks like it carries about 40 people. Each car can carry 5, although in reality, each only carries 1 (sometimes 2).

Just helps to emphasize the point that traffic congestion will never be resolved by simply building more roads and adding lanes. Single-occupancy cars just take up too much space. There isn't enough space to accommodate them all. There never will be.

[Resident]

These sorts of videos and historical items would have barely seen the light of day in the days before the Web and YouTube.

As much junk as there is on the Internet, there are also some neat obscure items too.

[david]

@contrarian
I rode that streetcar many times. From downtown to N.E. Not only was N.Y. ave tree lined but Rhode Island ave and North Capitol street as well. There were plans for a freeway that would have cut though from N.Y. and New Jersey ave. though Brook-land. That freeway now dead ends at N.Y. and N.J. ave. The most fun for me as a child was to ride the streetcar through the tunnel under DuPont circle . During the 1960's there was a program of street widening that lead to the destruction of many tress and yards and the replacement of lamp post with the prison yard type flood lights. Rhode Island ave. was once lined by huge tress whose branches made the street like a huge long canopy of green all the way from downtown well into N.E. But best of all was soldiers home before the Hospital center and the freeways. The haft of Soldiers home was once park with flowering plants etc. It was left unattended for many many years. So in the spring this stuff having grown wild an unattended would bloom.

[Shalom]

Coincidentally, I happened to ride most of that 82 route today! From Bloomingdale / Eckington, up to College Park, and back.

It's interesting that large portions of the right-of-way have survived all these years, esp. in PG County (but even downtown, in the form of still being the better streets for bikes). Despite the hiccups with the Cafritz development in Riverdale etc, it really wouldn't take that much to restore a contiguous path up there.