Origins Electric streetcars first appeared in Los Angeles in 1887. In 1895 the Pasadena & Pacific Railway was created from a merger of the Pasadena and Los Angeles Railway and the Los Angeles Pacific Railway (to Santa Monica). The Pasadena & Pacific Railway boosted Southern California tourism, living up to its motto "from the mountains to the sea."
streetcar of the Pacific Electric makes a stop at
Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, 1905. The Pacific Electric Railway was created in 1901 by railroad executive
Henry E. Huntington and banker
Isaias W. Hellman. As a Vice President of the
Southern Pacific Railroad (SP), operated by his uncle
Collis Potter Huntington, Henry E. Huntington had a background in electric streetcar lines in San Francisco, where he oversaw SP's effort to consolidate many smaller street railroads into one organized network. Hellman, the President of the Nevada Bank, San Francisco's largest, became one of the largest bond holders for these lines and he and the younger Huntington developed a close business relationship. The success of their San Francisco trolley adventure and Hellman's experience in financing some early Los Angeles trolley lines led them to invest in the purchase of some existing downtown Los Angeles lines which they began to standardize and organize into one network called the
Los Angeles Railway. When his uncle Collis died, Henry lost a boardroom battle for control of the Southern Pacific to Union Pacific President
E. H. Harriman. Huntington then decided to focus his energies on Southern California. In May 1901, Hellman, who had been Southern California's leading banker for almost three decades, wrote Huntington that "the time is at hand when we should commence building suburban railroads out of the city." Hellman added that he had already tasked engineer
Epes Randolph to survey and lay out the company's first line which would be to Long Beach. In that same year, Huntington and Hellman incorporated a new entity, the Pacific Electric Railway of California, formed to construct new electric rail lines to connect Los Angeles with surrounding cities. Hellman and his group of investors owned the controlling majority of stock (double that of Huntington's) and the newspapers of the time referred to it as the Huntington-Hellman syndicate. Using surrogates, the syndicate began purchasing property and rights-of-way. The company's first main project, the
Long Beach Line, opened on July 4, 1902. Huntington experienced periods of opposition from organized labor with the construction of the new railways. Tensions between union leaders and like-minded Los Angeles businessmen were high from the early 1900s up through the 1920s. Strikes and boycotts troubled the Pacific Electric throughout those years, simmering with the onset of
World War I, reaching a height of violence in the
Los Angeles streetcar strike of 1919. Railroads were one part of the enterprise. Revenue from passenger traffic rarely generated a profit, unlike freight. The real money for the investors was in supplying electric power to new communities and in developing and selling real estate. To get the railways and electricity to their towns, local groups offered the Huntington interest opportunities in local land. Soon Huntington and his partners had significant holdings in the land companies developing
Naples,
Bay City (Seal Beach), Huntington Beach, Newport Beach and Redondo Beach. in
Perris, California. Harriman, who controlled the powerful
Southern Pacific Railroad, was concerned with the competition that these new electric lines gave his steam railroad traffic, and had been prodding Huntington for joint ownership of the lines but Huntington refused to negotiate. In early 1903, Harriman proposed a franchise plan with three-cent fare plan to the Los Angeles City Council, a plan which, if accepted, would have handicapped the other railways severely. Huntington countered with a ticket book which gave the rider of travel for $6.25, which undercut the Harriman strategy. The Council vetoed the franchise idea, unable to believe adequate service could be provided for such a low fare. Then, on April 14, 1903, Harriman bought Hook's Los Angeles Traction Company, which ran lines within the downtown area and, through its California Pacific subsidiary, was constructing a line from Los Angeles to
San Pedro. The final confrontation came over a bidding war for the 6th Street franchise, in which the franchise (thought to be worth maybe $10,000), finally went to the top bidder for $110,000, with Harriman the secret winner. In May 1903, Huntington made an overnight trip to
San Francisco and worked out an arrangement with Harriman. The Pacific Electric would get the Los Angeles Traction Lines, SP's San Gabriel Valley Rapid Transit Railway line, the 6th Street franchise, and some downtown trackage. In return, Harriman got 40.3% of PE stock, an amount equal to Huntington's, with Hellman, Borel and De Guigne owning the remaining 20%. Huntington could expand the PE as he saw fit, but he was not to compete with existing SP lines. A byproduct of this sale was that Harriman sold the banking unit of his
Wells Fargo Company to Hellman who merged it with his Nevada Bank operations and established the Pacific Coast's largest, most powerful bank.
Construction On June 6, 1903, Huntington created the Los Angeles Inter-Urban Railway, capitalized at $10 million, with plans to extend lines to
Santa Ana,
Newport Beach, the
San Fernando Valley,
La Habra,
Redlands and
Riverside, with branches to
Colton and
San Bernardino. He simultaneously created the Los Angeles Land Company. Huntington owned almost all the stock in the companies, with token amounts allotted to company directors. Although the company allowed Huntington to proceed with construction plans unencumbered by outside interference, the poor state of the bond market meant that he had to turn to stockholders to finance expansion. In 1904 he acquired and finished the Los Angeles and Glendale Railway. In June, LAIU assumed control of the Riverside and Arlington Railway and the Santa Ana and Orange Motor Railway, and soon after, PE and LAIU finished their extension to
Huntington Beach and began building a line to
Covina. Huntington continued to expand and not declare profits. On December 7, 1904, the Hellman group sold the rest of their shares and bonds in PE and LAIU to Huntington and Harriman for $1.2 million. Huntington and Harriman were now equal partners in ownership of the Pacific Electric. The Hellman syndicate retained their 45% interest in the Los Angeles Railway, which they thought would eventually declare dividends. By 1905, the Newport and Santa Ana lines were completed. In 1906, the Newport line was extended to Balboa, and in late 1906, lines to Sierra Madre and Oak Knoll in Pasadena were finished. The two firms controlled of track, with the Pacific Electric at and the LAIU, . Huntington purchased the Los Angeles and Redondo Railway in July 1905, along with the Redondo Land Company, which owned 90% of the land in the beach community. This announcement precipitated a land boom in the area which resulted in a quick return of Huntington's entire investment in the area and in the railway. On March 19, 1906, an agreement was reached to sell control of the
Los Angeles Pacific Railroad lines, owned by
Moses Sherman and
Eli P. Clark, for a reported $6 million to Harriman; this turned over all the lines in downtown
Los Angeles to
Santa Monica and down the coast to
Redondo Beach to the Southern Pacific. In January 1907, the
Hellman syndicate, after seeing that Huntington ran the Los Angeles Railway similarly to PE, continually expanding and not declaring dividends, sold their 45% stake in the Los Angeles Railway to Harriman and the Southern Pacific. The Covina line was completed in 1907, as well as a line from
Monrovia to
Glendora. The system reached
La Habra in 1908. By 1910 PE operated nearly of track. Routes had been built into or passed through areas just beginning to grow. 1905 was the Pacific Electric's most profitable year, when the road made $90,711. Profits from the Huntington Land and Improvement Company made up for the poor earnings of the interurban system, with profits of $151,000 in 1905 rising to $402,000 in 1907. However, in 1909, earnings were only $75,000. Huntington had begun long negotiations with Harriman about consolidating the
Los Angeles electric railways beginning in 1907. There had always been a difference between the two men as to the purpose of the railway, with Huntington seeing the PE as a means to facilitate his real estate efforts, and Harriman seeing it as part of the Southern Pacific's overall transportation system in
Southern California. Harriman left Huntington alone until 1910, when the former refused to allow the latter to run a line to
San Diego that would have interfered with a competitive arrangement Harriman had worked out with the
Santa Fe Railway. In July 1908, Huntington leased all the lines of the Los Angeles Inter-Urban Railway to Harriman. In 1909 he sold the systems in
Fresno and
Santa Clara County to the Southern Pacific. Talks paused after the death of Harriman on September 9, 1909, but resumed in early 1910. On September 27, 1910, Huntington and Southern Pacific management came to a final agreement. In a complicated stock and bond transaction, Huntington conveyed his 50% of Pacific Electric to the Southern Pacific, while he acquired SP's 45% interest in the Los Angeles Railway. In addition, Huntington conveyed the Los Angeles and Redondo Railway to the Southern Pacific. Huntington retained control of the Los Angeles Railway, the narrow-gauge street car system known locally as the "Yellow Cars," until a controlling interest in this company was sold off by Huntington's estate in 1944.
The Great Merger and the "New" Pacific Electric and Olive (1912) In what was called the "Great Merger" of September 1, 1911, the
Southern Pacific created a new Pacific Electric Railway Company, with all electrical operations now under the Pacific Electric name. The constituent railroads were: • Original "old" PE owned by
Huntington •
Los Angeles Inter-Urban Railway •
Los Angeles Pacific Railway •
Los Angeles and Redondo Railway •
San Bernardino Valley Traction Company •
San Bernardino Interurban Railway •
Redlands Central Railway Company •
Riverside and Arlington Railway Company Following these acquisitions, PE was the largest operator of
interurban electric railway passenger service in the world, with 2,160 daily trains over of track. It operated to many destinations in Southern California, particularly to the south and east. The
Southern Pacific now began to emphasize freight operations. From 1911, when revenue from freight was $519,226, freight revenue climbed to $1,203,956 in 1915, 13% of total revenue. During the 1920s profits were good and the lines were extended to the Pasadena area, to the beaches at Santa Monica, Del Rey, Manhattan/Redondo/Hermosa Beach and Long Beach in Los Angeles County, and to Newport Beach and Huntington Beach in Orange County. Extra service beyond the normal schedules was provided on weekends, particularly in the late afternoon when passengers wanted to return simultaneously. Comedian
Harold Lloyd highlighted the popularity and utility of the system in an extended sequence in his 1924 film
Girl Shy, where, after finding one Red Car too crowded, he commandeered another and drove at high speed through the streets of Culver City and Los Angeles. In response to a proposal to establish the first
bus company in Los Angeles by
William Gibbs McAdoo, Pacific Electric and the
Los Angeles Railway proposed their own system, the
Los Angeles Motor Bus Company. A public referendum chose the latter in May 1923. The first service began in August 1923, and by 1925 had 53 miles of bus routes, the second-most in the nation after
Chicago. PE operated frequent freight trains under electric power throughout its service area (as far as ) to
Redlands, including operating electrically powered
Railway Post Office routes, one of the few U.S. interurbans to do so. This provided important revenue. The PE was responsible for an innovation in grade crossing safety: the automatic electromechanical grade crossing signal, nicknamed the
wigwag. This device was quickly adopted by other railroads. A few wigwags continue in operation . . Many of the museum's streetcars are serviceable and operated for the public. During this period, the Los Angeles Railway provided local streetcar service in central Los Angeles and to nearby communities. These trolleys were known as the "Yellow Cars" and carried more passengers than the PE's "Red Cars" since they ran in the most densely populated portions of Los Angeles, including south to Hawthorne and along Pico Boulevard to near West Los Angeles to terminate at the huge Sears Roebuck store and distribution center (the L.A. Railway's most popular line, the "
P" line). The Yellow Cars' unusual narrow-gauge
PCC streetcars, by now painted MTA two-tone green, continued to operate until the end of rail service in 1963. Large profits from land development were generated along the routes of the new lines.
Huntington Beach was incorporated in 1909 and developed by the Huntington Beach Company, a real-estate development firm owned by Henry Huntington, which still owns both land in the city and most of the mineral rights. There are other local
streetcar suburbs.
Angelino Heights was built around the Temple Street horsecar, which was later upgraded to electric streetcar as part of the Yellow Car system.
Highland Park was developed along the Figueroa Street trolley lines and railroads linking downtown Los Angeles and Pasadena. Huntington owned nearly all the stock in the Pacific Electric Land Company.
West Hollywood was established by
Moses Sherman and his partners of the Los Angeles and Pacific Railway. Moses Sherman,
Harry Chandler,
Hobart Johnstone Whitley, and others bought the entire southern San Fernando Valley in 1910. The electric railway and a $500,000 boulevard called Sherman Way connected the three townsites they were selling. These included
Van Nuys, Marion (now
Reseda), and Owensmouth (now
Canoga Park). Parts of Sherman Way are now called Chandler Boulevard and
Van Nuys Boulevard. The railway company "connected all the dots on the map and was a leading player itself in developing all the real estate that lay in between the dots".
Decline Huntington's involvement with urban rail was intimately tied to his real estate development operations. Real estate development was so lucrative for Huntington and SP that they could use the Red Car as a
loss leader. However, by 1920, when most of the company's holdings had been developed, their major income source began to deplete. Many rural passenger lines were unprofitable, with losses offset by revenue generated from passenger lines in populated corridors and from freight operations. The least-used Red Car lines were converted to cheaper bus routes as early as 1925. In 1936, Pacific Electric acquired the Motor Transit Company, which operated intercity bus service within Southern California. In the pre-automobile era, electric
interurban rail was the most economical way to connect outlying suburban and
exurban parcels to central cities. Although the railway owned extensive private roadbeds, usually between urban areas, much PE trackage in urban areas such as downtown Los Angeles west of the Los Angeles River was in streets shared with automobiles and trucks. Virtually all street crossings were at-grade, and increasing automobile traffic led to decreasing Red Car speeds on much of its trackage. At its nadir, the busy Santa Monica Boulevard line, which connected Los Angeles to Hollywood and on to Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, had an average speed of Traffic congestion was of such great concern by the late 1930s that the influential
Automobile Club of Southern California engineered an elaborate plan to create an elevated freeway-type Motorway System, a key aspect of which was the dismantling of the streetcar lines, replacing them with buses that could run on both local streets and on the new express roads. When the freeway system was planned in the 1930s the
city planners planned to include
interurban tracks in the center margin of each freeway but the plan was never implemented. There was one exception that was within the Hollywood Freeway through Cahuenga Pass. The San Fernando Valley line from Hollywood took to the center of the Freeway over the pass and exited at Lankershim Boulevard. When that service was terminated, the freeway was expanded onto the former PE roadbed. The Whittier & Fullerton line was cut in 1938, Redondo Beach, Newport Beach, Sawtelle via San Vicente, and Riverside in 1940. When the San Bernardino Freeway opened in 1941 but was not yet connected to the Hollywood Freeway, while the "Four Way" overpass was being constructed, westbound car traffic from the SB freeway poured onto downtown streets near the present Union Station. PE's multiple car trains coming and going from Pasadena, Sierra Madre, and Monrovia/Glendora used those same streets the final few miles from private right-of-way to reach the 6th and Main PE terminal and were bogged down within this jammed traffic. Schedules could not be met, plus former patrons were now driving. The San Bernardino line, Pomona branch, Temple City branch via Alhambra's Main Street, San Bernardino's Mountain View local to 34th Street, Santa Monica Boulevard via Beverly Hills, and all remaining Pasadena local services were all cut in 1941. Permission was received in September 1942 to abandon the shuttle line to General Hospital which company officials said had been operating at a loss for several months. The Glendale line survived to the early 1950s due to the convenience of a subway into downtown Los Angeles and used the company's only modern equipment, a group of streamlined PCC cars. In 1940, Pacific Electric sold its
Glendale,
Burbank, and
Pasadena operations to
Pacific City Lines.
San Bernardino operations were sold to San Bernardino Valley Transit. PE carried increased passenger loads during World War II, when Los Angeles County's population nearly doubled as war industries concentrated in the region attracting millions of workers. There were several years when the company's income statement showed a profit when gasoline and rubber were rationed and much of the populace depended on mass transit. At peak operation toward the end of the war, the PE dispatched over 10,000 trains daily and was a major employer in Southern California. However, the equipment in use was old and suffered from deferred maintenance. The nation's last interurban
railway post office (RPO) service was operated by PE on its San Bernardino Line. This was inaugurated comparatively late, on September 2, 1947. It left LA's new Union Station interurban yard on the west side of the terminal, turned north onto Alameda Street at 12:45 pm and reached San Bernardino at 4:40 pm, taking three hours for the trip while making postal stops en route as required. It did not operate on Sundays or holidays. This last RPO was pulled off May 6, 1950. Aware that most new arrivals planned to stay in the region after the war, local municipal governments, Los Angeles County and the state agreed that a massive infrastructure improvement program was necessary. At that time politicians agreed to construct a web of freeways across the region. This was seen as a better solution than a new mass transit system or an upgrade of the PE.
Freeway construction Large-scale land acquisition for new freeway construction began in earnest in 1951. The original four freeways of the area, the
Hollywood,
Arroyo Seco (formerly Pasadena),
Harbor, and
San Bernardino, were in use or being completed. Partial completion of the San Bernardino Freeway to Aliso Street near downtown Los Angeles led to traffic chaos when inbound automobiles left the freeway and entered city streets. The Southern District's passenger service to Santa Ana and Baldwin Park ended in 1950 as did the Northern District's Pasadena's Oak Knoll line, and the Sierra Madre line. The Western District's last line to Venice and Santa Monica also ended. The Pasadena and Monrovia/Glendora lines ended in 1951. The various public agencies—city, county, and state—agreed with PE that further abandoning service was necessary and PE happily complied. PE management had earlier compared costs of refurbishing the Northern District interurban lines to Pasadena, Monrovia/Glendora, and Baldwin Park versus the alternative of converting to buses, and found in favor of the latter. Remaining PE passenger service was sold off in 1953 to Metropolitan Coach Lines, which was given two years of rent-free usage of rail facilities. Jesse Haugh, of Metropolitan Coach Lines, was a former executive of
Pacific City Lines which together with
National City Lines acquired local streetcar systems across the country with the intention of shutting them down and converting them to bus operation in what became known as the
Great American Streetcar Scandal. Several lines operating to the north and the west which used the
Belmont Tunnel from the
Subway Terminal Building downtown ceased operation – the Hollywood Boulevard and Beverly Hills lines were shut down in 1954 and service to the San Fernando Valley, Burbank and Glendale using newly acquired
PCC streetcars lasted only to 1955. The Bellflower line to the south closed in 1958 as the Golden State/Santa Ana (Interstate 5) neared completion.
Public ownership The
Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority was established in 1951 to study the possibility of establishing a publicly owned
monorail line running north from Long Beach to downtown Los Angeles and then west to Panorama City in the San Fernando Valley. In 1954, the agency's powers were expanded to allow it to propose a more extensive regional mass-transit system. In 1957, it was given the authority to operate transit lines. In 1958, the California state government through its
Public Utility Commission took over the remaining and most popular lines from Metropolitan Coach Lines. The MTA also purchased the remaining streetcar "Yellow Car" lines of the successor of the
Los Angeles Railway, then called Los Angeles Transit Lines. LARy/LATL had been purchased from the Huntington estate by
National City Lines in 1945. The MTA started operating all lines as a single system on March 3, 1958. The Los Angeles-to-Long Beach passenger rail line served the longest, from July 4, 1902, until April 9, 1961. It was both the first and last interurban passenger line of the former Pacific Electric system. It was replaced by the Motor Coach 36f ("F" representing Freeway Flyer) route. The line, which used long stretches of open country running on private right-of-way, was later utilized when the Southern California RTD was designing and building the
Metro Blue Line light rail line. The Blue Line, the first modern mass transit line in Los Angeles since the discontinuation of the Red Car service, was first opened in 1990. The few remaining trolley-coach routes and narrow-gauge streetcar routes of the former Los Angeles Railway "Yellow Cars" were removed in early 1963. The public transportation system continued to be operated by the Los Angeles MTA until the agency was reorganized and relaunched as the
Southern California Rapid Transit District in September 1964. The
Interstate Commerce Commission approved the merger of Pacific Electric into the
Southern Pacific Railroad on August 12, 1965. Prior to the merger, PE's lucrative freight service had been by Southern Pacific diesel-electric locomotives on the heavy-duty PE rail-bed and rails and tripping the "wigwag" crossing signals. A Christmas tree lot was operated in the small stub yard at the northwest corner of Willow Street and Long Beach Boulevard – the stock arrived in and was stored in a steel sided box car until the Christmas trees were prepared for sale – the busy intersection was where dual trackage departed Long Beach Boulevard and joined the private right-of-way from Huntington Beach and Seal Beach towards Los Angeles. The crossing signal there was the first installation of the final design of the Magnetic Watchman
wigwag crossing signal and crossbucks. Oil tank cars were still shuttled to Signal Hill even as the surface street tracks were torn up from the center of Long Beach Boulevard long after the copper overhead catenary supply wires had been removed. Southern Pacific (now part of
Union Pacific) continues to operate freight service utilizing former PE right-of-way. == Post-closure ==