Streetcar services The first street railway service began in 1859 along State Street. At the time, the service was operated using
horsecars. Within the next few decades, additional horsecar services, which were operated by multiple companies, entered operation. Throughout the 1880s, these lines were converted to
cable cars. Between the 1890s and the 1900s, cable cars were replaced with electric streetcars.
Trolleybus services serving route 85-Central in 1968 In 1953, the CTA placed an order for
Flxible buses after the latter's absorption of the
Fageol Twin Coach Company. Until 1973, CTA's fleet included a large number of
electric trolley buses – or "trolley coaches", as they were commonly known at the time. In the 1950s, the fleet of around 700 trolley coaches was the largest such fleet in the U.S., and represented about one-quarter of CTA's total number of surface-transit vehicles (motor bus, trolley bus and, until 1958,
streetcar). Possibly influenced by the
1967 Chicago blizzard, during which CTA trolley buses were unable to maneuver around abandoned automobiles without dewiring, CTA decided to discontinue trolley bus service. Trolley bus service was phased out in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and trolley buses ran for the last time on March 25, 1973. CTA bought very few buses between the mid-1970s and the end of the 1980s. During this time, purchases were only made in 1979 (20
MAN/
AM General SG 220 articulated buses), 1982-83 (200
Flyer D901 buses and 125 additional MAN articulateds), and 1985 (362 MAN Americana standard-length buses). Another aspect of this period was that with the exception of the 1979 and 1983 MAN orders, none of those buses had air-conditioning, a budget saving move by the CTA. The 1972-76 fleet of
GM "New Look" buses, 1870 total, which were originally air-conditioned (although there were problems with the air-conditioning systems, eventually being disabled and sliding windows installed in the buses), composed the majority of vehicles in service into the early 1990s. In 1995, the CTA placed an experimental order of their first 65 low floor transit buses from
New Flyer Industries, the
D40LF. Also, that same year, the CTA received its last order of high floor buses from Flxible Corporation, shortly before the manufacturer folded. In 1998, the CTA placed an order for 484 new low floor transit buses from Canadian bus-building firm
Nova Bus. This executed move billed the CTA as Nova's American launch customer for the latter's signature product, the LFS series. This was also done to meet the "Buy American" requirements for buses in the United States transit bus market, since
General Motors ceased bus production and Flxible went out of business. Lastly, these buses replaced the ones that were built in 1983 and 1985 due to their age as well as their lack of air conditioning and ADA compliance. In the 2010s, bus projects that sought to implement some features of
bus rapid transit were conducted. The
Jeffery Jump opened in November 2012, and the
Loop Link opened in December 2015. ==Fleet==