19 pictures showing the history of Detroit’s streetcar system

By the early 1860s, Jefferson, Woodward, Gratiot and Michigan avenues were already trimmed with rail. Catering to the city's upper classes, dray teams pulled passengers along Detroit's radial arteries at a stately pace for 5 cents. Pictured here is a horse car of the Detroit City Railway. Note the arrow pointing to the bell on one horse’s neck.

The city offered franchises lasting for decades to private companies. By the mid-1870s, Detroit had 10 competing streetcar companies, each with its own lines, some running down arrow-straight thoroughfares, others zigzagging through the city, making turns every few blocks, sometimes paralleling the competition's tracks for miles at a stretch, belying the hodgepodge construction of routes. Pictured here is a horse car on the Woodward Line in 1882.

The conversion to machine power was equally fitful. Some streetcars ran on unshielded wires strung overhead, others on third rails embedded in slots in the street. A line on Cadillac even used steam power briefly. But by the end of 1895, the last company had completely electrified its operations. If the photographic records are correct, this image is of one of the last holdouts from the 1890s, on a turntable for cars at Hamilton and Holden.

Many Detroiters began to view the private companies providing streetcar transportation as greedy, self-interested trusts, lagging behind in improvements to infrastructure and charging high fares. After his election in 1889, Detroit's progressive Mayor Hazen Pingree (pictured here as the motorman) campaigned to get the companies to adopt 3-cent fares as their standard fixed price, with free transfers. When the companies refused, the maverick mayor sought to build publicly owned rail lines that would provide working-class passengers affordable transit.

By the 1910s, Detroit was the hub of one of the largest unified electrical transportation systems in the world. Detroit United Railways operated what may have been the largest regional electric rail system in the world. It had more than 800 miles of track, more than 200 of them in the city limits of Detroit, where one fare would get you across town, and 600 miles in the high-speed interurban lines.

Impressive though the DUR’s network was, the impression that it was an unaccountable monopoly prevailed. Battles over fares and fights against extending expiring franchises characterized the 22-year reign of the DUR, and a lively battle was waged in the press, with a great deal of support for municipal ownership.

Another fighter for municipal ownership was Detroit Mayor James Couzens. He chaired the Detroit Street Railway Commission, whose goal was to make Hazen Pingree’s dream of a municipally owned streetcar system a reality. Under his leadership, Detroiters approved a $15 million bond issue to build a city-owned system. Here Couzens is pictured wielding a sledgehammer.

Before he left office in 1922, Mayor Couzens got the job done. On March 13, 1922, the city of Detroit purchased all track from the DUR for a sum of $19,850,000. Detroit’s Department of Street Railways began operating all streetcars in Detroit from April 1922 onward.

Public anger and expiring franchises weren’t the only things hurting the DUR: Improvements to roads were lifting automobiles out of the muck and putting them on asphalt and concrete. The streetcar had always been the surest way around town, but now it faced competition from the private motorcar in a way it hadn’t before. They would exist side-by-side for the time being.

In theory, what Detroit got for its money was one of the most thorough municipal streetcar systems in the world. But the system had seen better days. Since the private investors running it weren’t certain how long they’d be allowed to continue, the city’s trackage needed maintenance and investment.

Luckily, all those pennies and nickels Detroiters spent for transportation helped pay for the bonds, the improvements, and even new bus lines. According to researcher Ken Schramm, this photo shows the counting room at the DSR's administration building: “This is the room that sorted and counted the approximately $100K received daily from the DSR's streetcars and buses.”

Still, it wasn’t easy running a sprawling municipal system, with many things working against it: Upgrading worn-out infrastructure, the challenge of integrating buses into a rail system, increasing competition for roadway from automobiles, and labor trouble.

But as much as Detroiters had hated the old “traction trusts,” a general affection for the DSR prevailed after the defeat of the DUR. Detroiters were proud to own their own transportation system. And that pride was touted in films, and evinced in the formal attire DSR workers wore in the performance of their duties. Take a look at this smart outfit, likely from the 1940s.

Nonetheless, the DSR’s employees were as militant as any other Detroit working people during the union fever of the late 1930s and early 1940s. In this photograph from 1941, striking street railway workers “gather around table to watch game of dominoes.”

Though Detroiters loved their streetcars, DSR chief Fred Nolan loved buses more, and hoped to phase out rail transit by 1953. The only thing that prevented that from happening was World War II, given tire rationing, fuel rationing, and the tremendous need to move large amounts of war workers to defense plants.

After the war, the push was on again to complete the system-wide conversion. Even though the city had bought a new fleet of PCC streetcars (seen in background), the DSR seemed determined to exploit every opportunity to make a rail line into a bus line. In 1951, three lines were switched abruptly to buses during a DSR strike. More closings followed until August 1955, when Mayor Albert Cobo, who promoted freeway construction as the way of the future, urged City Council to sell the city's recently purchased fleet of modern streetcars to Mexico City.

It was a controversial move. A newspaper poll showed that Detroiters, by a margin of 3-to-1, opposed the switch to buses. Some even jeered the sunken freeways Cobo championed, dubbing them "Cobo canals." DSR historian Richard Andrews told us, "A lot of people were against the decision. There was even some agitation. A common complaint was about the sale of the [PCC streetcars], that the city didn't get its money's worth. Of course, the city had an answer for anything..."

On April 8, 1956, the last streetcar in Detroit rolled down Woodward Avenue. After less than 10 years in service, Detroit's fleet of streamlined streetcars was loaded on railcars and shipped to Mexico City, where they ran for another 30 years. Schramm notes, "They might have lasted even longer if Mexico City hadn't lost 40 or 50 of them in earthquakes."

Not all cities gave up their rapid transit systems. Chicago, New York, Boston, and San Francisco kept their rail transit and none of them fell as far as Detroit did in the 1970s and 1980s. Today we’re seeing the first stirrings of an effort to restore light rail to Detroit. Where the “Q Line” will go, and how the auspices of private funding will shake out, have yet to be revealed. Detroit’s 3.3 miles of rail should be operational by 2017.