Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti Street Railway

In October 1889 the city of Ypsilanti, Michigan invited the Haines Company of Kinderhook, New York to construct street railway within the city. The following summer Charles Delemere Haines arrived in Ypsilanti and quickly determined that the city's population could not support its own streetcar system, but that an interurban between it and neighboring Ann Arbor, Michigan, would be viable. Haines proposed a 7.5 mile line running from Ypsilanti's downtown to the edge of Ann Arbor. Haines predicted that the system would handle 500 passengers daily; at that time trains operated by the Michigan Central Railroad between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti carried forty. Trains operated every ninety minutes, at an average speed of eight miles per hour. The starting fare was ten cents. On August 26, 1896, the two companies formally merged to become the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti Electric Railway (AA&YRy). By November the route between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti was fully electrified, opening a direct route between the two cities with no need to change trains. The depot in Ypsi was on Washington Street, just north of today's Michigan Avenue (then called Congress Street). The depot in Ann Arbor eventually was located at West Huron and Ashley Streets. On May 11, 1898, the Detroit, Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor Railway (DY&AA) purchased the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti; a month later interurbans were operating all the way from Detroit to Ann Arbor, a forty-mile route. Shutdown Under a variety of names, interurbans continued to operate on the Ypsi-Ann's tracks, eventually coming under control of the Detroit, Jackson and Chicago Railway. The system finally shut down in 1929, in the face of steep competition from buses and automobiles. Ann Arbor's local trolley line had switched from street cars to buses in January, 1925. == Legacy ==

The Ypsi-Ann's downtown Ann Arbor terminal building was replaced by the Ann Arbor Greyhound depot in 1940. It served in that function until a hotel was built on the site in 2015. An intermediate depot in the Mallets Creek Settlement in Pittsfield Township—a tiny building at the SW corner of Packard and Platt—later housed the municipal office of the short-lived City of East Ann Arbor from 1947 through 1956. For years after the 1942 wartime scrap drives, it was believed that all of Ypsilanti's tracks had been removed, but in 2004 crews rebuilding a section of Washington Street found a stretch of rails buried under the pavement. The Ann Arbor Area Transportation Authority, the present-day public transit operator in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, operates 4 bus routes from downtown Ann Arbor to downtown Ypsilanti. The interurban's route is approximately paralleled by Route 5, which was the third-busiest bus route in the system in 2023. ==Notes==