A streetcar named yesterday
Published on January 7th, 2004
STONEHAM, MA - Decades before its four-wheeled gasoline powered successor would clog Routes I-93 and 28 with the morning and evening madness known as rush hour, these rusty-orange cousins of the modern bus were Stoneham's transportation kings.
Stoneham's streetcar line offered one of the first opportunities for citizens to use public transportation to travel to Boston and surrounding communities.
Once chugging down Stoneham's Montvale Avenue and Main Streets and slowly winding through the Sheepfold and Fells Reservation on its way to Sullivan Square, few tangible remnants of Stoneham's street car routes remain.
But Bradley Clarke wants people to remember. The author of a newly released book entitled, Streetcar Lines of the Hub: The 1940s Heyday of Electric Transit in Boston, Clarke details the history of streetcars not only in Stoneham, but throughout the Commonwealth.
According to Clarke, electric-powered trolleys, already antiquated and losing ridership at the outset of World War II, proved themselves useful one last time before giving way to the irresistible lure of the automobile.
"During the war, most people who had cars couldn't use them because of gasoline and tire rations. So harkening back to an earlier time, people used the streetcars as their primary source of transportation," explained Clarke.
"So for the duration of the war, streetcars that would have passed by earlier stayed. But in 1947, cars became available again and gasoline rationing stopped. And at that point, people starting buying and using automobiles fiercely and ferociously," the author added.
Clarke considers Stoneham's streetcars, run by the Eastern Massachusetts Street Railway, unique from many other electric trolleys that operated in Massachusetts' communities.
The most impressive architectural feature, Clarke points to one of the few tangible reminders of line's existence, a heavy concrete bridge that shot over the Black Hollow Pond in the Fells Reservation.
"It's just most improbable," said Clarke of the structure. "Normally you would consider a viaduct like that in a heavy populated city. It obviously was built for a double track route but it was only a single track because they didn't get the ridership they wanted."
Mary Marchant, the curator of the Stoneham Historical Society, recalls another forgotten landmark associated with the streetcars -- Stoneham's very own Man of the Mountain.
As a little girl, Marchant's parents used to point out the humanlike rock formation as the streetcar cut through the Fells Reservation.
"When I was a child they used to say, 'look quick', and you could see the silhouette of his face as we passed through. It was very similar to the Old Man in New Hampshire," Marchant reminisced, adding that the rock was blasted to pieces when Route I-93 was constructed.
Yet another unique feature of Stoneham's electric streetcars, its single track route, led to the transport's demise.
As Clarke explains, because inbound and outbound cars travelled along the same track, a traffic signal would alert conductors as to whether another car was travelling in the opposite direction.
Late in the afternoon on June 12, 1946, Stoneham resident and streetcar conductor James Purtle died and 23 others were injured when two cars smashed head-on near Spot Pond after the traffic signal malfunctioned.
While the accident itself didn't directly push the Stoneham's street car route into extinction, proponents of a modernized gasoline-powered bus service had all the ammunition they needed.
"What happened was people who wanted to get rid of them [streetcars], dubbed them the 'yellow peril' even though they were really more orange in color," said Clarke of the crash's aftermath.
And while cars, buses and trucks soon after dominated the road, Marchant speaks with a nostalgia tinge about the transportation system whose whispers reminder her of a different time in America.
"It was just a different way of looking at things then because we were more relaxed and not in such a blind rush to get everywhere," recalls Marchant.
"You just have to experience it. You could open the windows during the summer and feel a nice clean breeze. It's just not the same as driving on a bus where you get that heavy black pollution," the Stoneham native added.
North Reading resident Lester Stephenson, Jr., whose father conducted the last official ride of Stoneham's streetcars in trolley 4387 can deliver the experience Marchant speaks of.
A third generation streetcar operator, Stephenson claims that operating electric trolleys has been bred into his bloodline.
A member of Kennebunk-port, Maine's Seashore Trolley Museum, Stephenson and his son operate the museum's streetcar exhibit by conducting real-life rides in the same trolley his father rode during Stoneham's farewell voyage nearly 60 years ago.
"You go to a regular museum and the exhibit's under glass and they say, 'don't touch!' But one of the first things the museum founders said is how can you understand a trolley if you can't ride in one," says Stevenson of the exhibit.
Bradley Clarke's newly released book can be purchased for $54.95 by sending a mail order to: BSRA Publications Department; P.O. Box 77; Hingham, MA 02043. Additional information about the account can be found on http://members.aol.com/bsra5706 or by calling (781) 433-7015. Information on Kennebunkport's Seashore Trolley Museum can be obtained by logging onto: www.trolleymuseum.org or by calling (207) 967-2712.
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