, ca. 1903, near the site of the
Uptown Theater , the railroad's northern terminus, 1914 The Rock Creek Railway was founded by
Francis Newlands as part of a plan to develop streetcar suburbs in northwestern D.C. and adjacent Maryland. He and his partners incorporated the company on June 23, 1888 (just four days after D.C.'s first electric trolley company, the
Eckington and Soldiers' Home Railway). The railroad's officers were the same as the Chevy Chase Land Company's: Newlands, president; Edward J. Stellwagen, vice-president; Howard S. Nyman, secretary; Thomas M. Gale, treasurer, and A. J. Warner, manager. In 1890, the railroad began operations on its first quarter-mile of track, connecting
Connecticut Avenue NW and
18th Street NW along Florida Avenue (recently renamed from Boundary Street).
Overhead trolley poles were forbidden in this part of the city, so the railroad used the
Love conduit system between the rails to provide power to the cars.) Meanwhile, the Land Company was creating an extension of Connecticut Avenue northward from the
Rock Creek valley past the D.C.-Maryland line and into the land that would become Chevy Chase, Maryland. The railroad would run up the center of the new road, which was graded 150 feet wide. Tracks were laid from the original terminus at
U Street NW up 18th Street through the neighborhood today known as
Adams Morgan, where it formed a junction with the
Metropolitan Railroad at Columbia Road. Turning west along Erie Street (today's Calvert Street), the line approached the Rock Creek gorge. Bridging the valley was the railroad's single most difficult engineering challenge. The company hired the Edge Moor Iron Works to build an iron truss bridge at Cincinnati Street NW (now Calvert Street NW). The 775-foot, 1,226-ton bridge, whose six trusses sat on 125-foot-high iron trestles, was officially completed on July 21, 1891, at a total cost of $70,000. On the previous day, the railroad, under the terms of its charter, had transferred both of its bridges to the city of Washington, D.C. The line continued on Connecticut, over a
bridge over Klingle Valley, to the District line at
Chevy Chase Circle, then on trackage built by Newlands'
Chevy Chase Land Company 1.7 miles due north to just past
Coquelin Run in today's
unincorporated Chevy Chase, Maryland. This generating plant, which burned coal that arrived on a B&O
siding, used the Thomson-Houston system installed by General Electric to deliver electricity to streetcars via overhead poles. The poles—ornamented iron within the city and a mile beyond, square post lumber for the remaining mile—drove streetcars all the way to 18th and U Streets. On September 16, 1892, service opened on the six-mile extension of the line, making the Rock Creek Railway the first D.C.-based streetcar to operate in Maryland. Congress approved two proposed extensions on April 30, 1892. One was a northern spur to the
National Zoo that was never built, a process that took 30 seconds or less.) In 1894, the line regularly operated 20 streetcars on 15-minute
headways—and 7-minute headways on Sundays and holidays. The price for a single streetcar ride was 5 cents, or 6 rides for 25 cents. (It would rise to 7 cents in 1919.) One more source of passenger traffic was the
Chevy Chase Lake & Kensington Railway (later, the Kensington Railway Company), a streetcar line that opened in 1895 and ran two winding miles north from the Rock Creek's terminus to the town of
Kensington.
Expansion On March 1, 1895, Congress authorized the Rock Creek Railway to purchase the
Washington and Georgetown Railroad as part of an attempt to consolidate the streetcar system. Negotiations in August led to a deal in which the RCR issued stock with a total
par value of $12,000,000, of which $10,750,000 was given to W&G stockholders. The actual value of RCR stock and bonds at the time was $1,500,000 ($ today). On September 21, 1895, the two formed the
Capital Traction Company, the first company created during "the great streetcar consolidation." The following day, by happenstance, was the line’s busiest ever. “The combination of a hot, fair Sunday and the reduction of the fare on the Chevy Chase electric line to five cents for a full trip from the city” drew an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 riders. The rush caught the railroad by surprise, and only by requisitioning eight streetcars from the Georgetown lines was the streetcar line able to bring home all those it had transported to Chevy Chase Lake.
Aftermath The Rock Creek line fostered development along upper Connecticut Avenue, helping to spawn several
northwest Washington, D.C., neighborhoods:
Adams Morgan,
Woodley Park,
Cleveland Park,
North Cleveland Park,
Forest Hills, and
Chevy Chase. Similarly, and as explicitly intended by its founders, the line enabled the creation of the suburb of
Chevy Chase, Maryland. In 1911, the rickety Rock Creek bridge was shored up by narrowing its roadway from 40 feet to 25 and adding timber cribbing; in 1922, the timbers were replaced by steel joints and asphalt surface. In 1923, Capital Traction gained the right to run its streetcars on the tracks of the Kensington Railway, which allowed it to operate through service from downtown D.C. through Chevy Chase Lake to Norris Station in Kensington. In 1933, the original bridge over Klingle Road was replaced by a
larger and more ornate one; it would carry streetcars for just two years. Two years later, Capital Traction was given permission to
replace streetcars on the Chevy Chase line with buses. The last streetcars ran on September 15, 1935. The trolley poles, safety domes, and most of the waiting stations were removed the following week. The tracks remained for several years, but when the
Export Control Act was passed barring the sale of most scrap metal to Japan it had a loophole for old rails, which made Rock Creek rail quite valuable. At that point, the tracks in Maryland were pulled up and sold to Japan by the state of Maryland. It's likely the tracks were melted down for use in the Japanese war effort. In 1980, the Chevy Chase Lake waiting station at the northern end of the line was disassembled and moved to
Hyattstown, Maryland. == External links ==