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Home » 2010 » 01 » Trolleys in Lowell
Trolleys in Lowell
January 25th, 2010
I’ll confess, I’m a long time admirer of transportation systems. When I was growing up, I lived in such a small time that your feet or a bicycle would get you across town in under twenty minutes. My first experience with a real city and real transportation was London, and their transport system, the London Underground. London was the largest city in the world in 1900, and it had already developed a terrific transport, including the beginnings of a subway with the Metro and District Lines, that stretched back to the middle of the 1800s. Roughly during that same time, in the 19th Century, the United States was developing its own systems in the larger cities, such as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. However, outside of Boston, about thirty miles away, the town of Lowell, Massachusetts was still considered a city of pedestrians. After the Civil War, though, as the Industrial Revolution grew, Lowell began developing its own mass transport, the results of which you may see for yourself today at the Lowell National Streetcar Museum.
Transportation began for Lowell with the Lowell Horse Railroad Company, operating the first horse-powered streetcar. The line went from the east side of Lowell, in Belvidere, into downtown Lowell, then on to the west and Pawtucket Falls. The Horse Railroad Company made money and, as Lowell grew in size, so did the transportation lines The late 1880s saw the expansion of lines and the arrival of electric-powered trolleys. This meant a mass of overhead wires above the trolley tracks and a Union formed in 1903: The Amalgamated Association of Streetcar Employees. The trolleys, open to the air, took people from Lowell to the countryside and out to Canobie Lake in Southern New Hampshire. Eventually, though, the 1920s saw the beginning of the end of street railways and by 1935 electric trolley stopped running altogether in Lowell. Although your opportunity to ride a Lowell trolley does not depend on a time machine that might cast you seventy-five years into the past. The National Park Service returned the trolleys to service in 1984 and they run to this day.
Lowell is an amazing piece of American history, a city with a National Park in its center, dedicated to remembering the Industrial Age, taking old mills and remaking them into museums, such as the Boott Cotton Museum, where one can hear the roar of looms and see how the workers lived. It’s a place to take boat rides in canals, to take trolley rides on the streets, and to explore a different age and time. All you need to do is find a great place to stay.
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