ANOTHER TROLLEY PICTURE

I’m out of new stuff. It’s just too hot for these old bones to get back out on the street so I pulled a trolley picture from the archives. Our streetcar system was long gone when I got here for college in 1967. In the last several years, local boosters developed this trolley line from the history museum to the end of the Delmar Loop district. It was a boondoggle, way late and over-budget. It runs down the center of a busy street without the kind of appropriate stop structures you find in Europe. I thought it was shut down, but I was pleased to find it still running.                 

CLANG, CLANG, CLANG WENT THE TROLLEY

The caption is the name of a famous song from the (locally, at least) iconic movie, Meet Me In St. Louis, with Judy Garland. It takes place around the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, when we used to be somebody and had a functioning streetcar system. In recent years, a single trolley line was built from the Missouri History Museum, where I was attending an event, and west along Delmar Boulevard through the district known as The Loop. It’s called that because of the point where streetcars would loop around to return to the city center.

I’m trying out a new Blogger feature that adds Google search links to the posts.                   

Clang Clang Clang Went The Trolley

That song, as everyone knows (or should have known, as we say in legalese) is from the movie Meet Me In St. Louis. There used to be trolleys, or street cars, all over town. They went away, some of us think, in part due to the automobile manufactures who aided in creating highways that led to some of the worst suburban sprawl in the country.

But now we have one line again. Sort of. The Loop Trolley was meant to connect the west end of the Delmar Loop in University City to the Missouri History Museum, a mile or more into St. Louis itself. It's just now creeping into service, years late and and way over budget. It tried to begin running this month but one of them was hit by a car. Or hit a parked car. It's a little vague. Then the second one had electrical problems. So the first one was back in service this weekend, creeping up and down Delmar Boulevard. The retro cars are cute but we don't want to be marketing this to tourists just yet.