The Long Track Back

The Fall of the Red Cars: How LA Gave Up the Rails

Los Angeles once featured the largest electric railway system, the Pacific Electric Railway, Red Cars! connecting key regions. However, by 1961, the rise of automobiles led to its demise, shifting the city’s transit identity towards freeways.

Published

11 months ago

August 9, 2025

Daily News Staff

Last Updated on August 9, 2025 by Daily News Staff

At one time, Los Angeles boasted the largest electric railway system in the world. The Pacific Electric Railway — known as the Red Cars — stretched over 1,000 miles, connecting Downtown LA to Pasadena, Long Beach, Santa Monica, and beyond. It was a marvel of early 20th-century transit planning and an integral part of life in Southern California.

But by 1961, it was gone.

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The A Line follows the exact route of the old Red Car — once the largest electric rail system in America. In 1961, it disappeared. In 1990, it came back. LAMetro TransitTok HistoryInMotion UrbanPlanning #LosAngeles https://stmdailynews.com/the-fall-of-the-red-cars-how-la-gave-up-the-rails/ ♬ original sound – STMDailyNews – STMDailyNews

The Red Cars fell victim to a perfect storm: the rise of the automobile, the birth of suburbia, a freeway construction boom, and political decisions that prioritized highways over rail. General Motors, Standard Oil, and Firestone Tire — companies that would benefit from a car-dominated world — were famously linked to efforts to dismantle electric rail systems across the country, including LA.

By the late 1950s, LA’s transit identity had shifted completely. The city that once led the world in streetcars became the poster child for freeway culture.

But while the Red Cars were gone, the need for mass transit never left. And by the late 1980s, Los Angeles was ready to reconsider rail.

Next Up: The Blue Line Revival: LA Takes a Risk on Rail

The Knowledge

As Route 66 turns 100, what is it that we’re actually celebrating?

As Route 66 nears its 100th anniversary, a historian asks what we’re really honoring: the real 2,448-mile highway that reshaped towns and travel, or the mythic “Mother Road” nostalgia that often overlooks segregation, exclusion, and the communities the interstate era left behind.

Published

1 day ago

July 8, 2026

The Conversation

A road at dusk featuring neon signs, including a raised one spanning one side of the road to the other, featuring a neon version of a Route 66 highway marker. — A stretch of Route 66 in Albuquerque, N.M., pictured on June 7, 2026. Towns and cities located along the highway are gearing up to celebrate the iconic road’s centennial. Heather Diehl/Getty Images

Daniel Milowski, Arizona State University

Working in concert, the American Association of State Highway Officials and the Bureau of Public Roads adopted a uniform highway numbering system and corresponding map on November 11, 1926. The numbering system and map replaced the confusing patchwork of highways and trails, like the Lincoln Highway or the Old Trails Road, with an official network of numbered highways sanctioned by federal and state highway authorities.

Since then, a small group of these highways have attained the status of cultural icon. There’s Route 1, which snakes all the way from Maine to Florida. Route 101 is celebrated for its majestic views of the Pacific Ocean, while Route 6 was immortalized in “On the Road,” Jack Kerouac’s classic novel.

The most famous, though, is arguably Route 66, nicknamed the “Main Street of America” and the “Mother Road.”

Yet as the towns that dot the highway prepare to celebrate its centennial, I’ve found myself wondering what it is, exactly, that’s being celebrated.

As a historian of Route 66, I’ve written about how there are really two versions of this 2,448-mile (3,940-kilometer) stretch of pavement.

There’s the actual highway, which reflected the 20th-century expansion of the nation’s infrastructure. Then there’s the mythic highway – a cultural icon imbued with nostalgia for a specific, 20th-century idea of romance, adventure, freedom and the American West.

There was almost no 66

As state highway commissioners in the 1920s wrangled over the specifics of the nation’s new highway system, they prized highway numbers that ended in zero, since they indicated a cross-country route. The thinking went that these routes would get the most traffic and, with it, the most business.

Oklahoma State Highway Commissioner Cyrus Avery had been a big booster for a Chicago-to-Los Angeles road in order to juice highway traffic through the Midwest. He suggested calling it Route 60, claiming a coveted cross-country number.

But commissioners from Kentucky and Virginia objected, noting that Avery’s proposed road didn’t go from coast to coast. As an alternative, they suggested 62. Avery countered with a number that he thought had a better ring to it: 66.

With the numbering controversy settled, the map of America’s first highway system was approved. But another 12 years would pass before Route 66 was fully built out, making it the first U.S. highway to be paved end to end.

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Adventure, redemption and reinvention

While it took over a decade for the full, physical stretch of road to be completed, the making of the Route 66 myth began almost immediately.

Construction of the road had barely begun when Avery, John T. Woodruff and other prominent civic leaders along the highway’s path convened in January 1927 to form the U.S. Highway 66 Association to promote travel along the route.

The association began advertising Route 66 as the best West Coast travel route and even trademarked a slogan for the road, “The Main Street of America.” The association also sponsored spectacles like the Trans-American Footrace to help publicize Route 66.

The race, which started on March 4, 1928, in Los Angeles, received widespread media coverage. Reporters breathtakingly described the epic struggles of the racers, coupled with vivid descriptions of the Southwest landscape. The effect was a marriage of Route 66 to ideas of adventure and romance in America’s collective subconscious.

During the Great Depression and Dust Bowl years, thousands of migrants from the Great Plains and Midwest traveled west along Route 66, hoping to rebuild their lives in California.

Author John Steinbeck dubbed Route 66 the “Mother Road” in “The Grapes of Wrath,” likening it to an umbilical cord that delivered Oakie refugees fleeing the Dust Bowl in the Oklahoma Panhandle to a new life in California. Working for the New Deal-era Farm Security Administration, photographer Dorothea Lange documented the same Oakies fictionalized by Steinbeck. Her 1938 photograph “Family on the Road” captured a husband, wife and their two young children hitchhiking on Route 66 near Weatherford, Oklahoma, after losing their farm.

Black-and-white photo of an old car hauling a trailer of belongings along a dusty stretch of highway. — For families devastated by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, Route 66 served as a conduit for redemption and reinvention, inspiring author John Steinbeck to call it ‘The Mother Road.’ Bettmann/Getty Images

Together, Steinbeck and Lange helped imbue Route 66 with new layers of meaning tied to loss and redemption. Then, after World War II, Route 66 came to mythologize the postwar boom.

Bobby Troup’s 1946 song “(Get Your Kicks) on Route 66,” first recorded by the Nat King Cole Trio, cast the road as a postwar rite of passage. Millions of Americans went on to take family vacations to the American Southwest via Route 66, staying at roadside mom-and-pop motels, grabbing burgers at neon-lit diners and posing beside oversized roadside landmarks.

Myth versus reality

But the iconic imagery and myths of Route 66 are often at odds with the reality of the road.

I’ve come to see Troup’s song as encapsulating the tension between these two versions of Route 66.

In 1946, when Nat King Cole recorded “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” Cole and his band were unable to get their own “kicks” on Route 66. That’s because few businesses located along Route 66 were willing to serve them. Jim Crow-era copies of the Green Book – a directory of businesses that would accommodate Black road trippers – show just how few options there were.

‘(Get Your Kicks on)’ Route 66’ helped immortalize the highway in American culture. Al Drago/Getty Images

It would take passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – and subsequent enforcement efforts by the Justice Department – for the travel amenities and services along Route 66 to be equally available to all Americans, regardless of their race.

Yet by the time the highway’s motels, diners, auto repair shops and gas stations were open to all travelers, Route 66’s downturn had already begun.

The 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act turbocharged the construction of new, limited-access interstate highways. These new postwar highways prioritized fast travel between major cities and their suburbs, where Americans were flocking to in large numbers.

Fast travel, however, came at the expense of small towns bypassed by the new highways, depriving many Route 66 businesses of the customers they needed to survive.

In contrast to older mom-and-pop businesses, national corporate chain motels, restaurants and gas stations dominated the new interstate highway exits. Rather than risk exposing themselves to Justice Department Civil Rights scrutiny, they made it known that they welcomed all travelers, further enticing drivers away from older establishments.

Now, as Route 66 turns 100, there’s a gap between how the road is remembered by some and how it functioned for most. Free and easy travel on the road and “getting your kicks” were limited to white Americans. Much of Route 66’s iconography emerged from early highway association marketing efforts aimed at white Americans. Few African American or Latino travelers likely feel the same nostalgia.

Today, a lot of Route 66 nostalgia has a “back to the 1950s” vibe that celebrates pre-Civil Rights America as a purer, simpler, more authentic era. This faux-authentic America better reflects the place some Americans today wish they could live in – a less complicated, less diverse land of adventure, romance and opportunity, rather than the nuanced, complicated America they actually inhabit today.

A roadside motel at dusk with a vintage car parked in the lot and a large blue and pink neon sign reading 'Blue Swallow Motel.' — Oversized neon signs, like at this Route 66 motel, enticed weary drivers to stop and stay, but these establishments were not available to all travelers. Al Drago/Getty Images

Daniel Milowski, Adjunct Professor of History, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The Conversation

Transportation

How San Francisco Got Its Cable Cars: The Story Behind an Icon

Published

1 month ago

June 3, 2026

Rod Washington

Discover the history of San Francisco’s cable cars—from a 19th-century innovation to a preserved national landmark still running today.

Few transportation systems in the world are as instantly recognizable as the cable cars of San Francisco. Climbing steep hills with a steady hum and a nostalgic charm, these moving landmarks are more than just a tourist attraction—they’re a triumph of innovation born out of necessity.

🐎 A Problem on the Hills

In the mid-1800s, San Francisco was growing rapidly, but its geography posed a serious challenge. The city’s steep inclines made travel difficult, especially for horse-drawn streetcars, which were the primary form of public transportation at the time.

Horses often struggled to pull heavy loads uphill, and accidents were common. In some cases, animals collapsed under the strain. This dangerous and inefficient system needed a solution.

💡 The Vision of Andrew Hallidie

That solution came from Andrew Smith Hallidie, an engineer and entrepreneur who envisioned a safer, more reliable way to move people through the city.

Hallidie developed a system in which streetcars would be pulled by a continuously moving cable running beneath the street—eliminating the need for horses altogether.

⚙️ The First Cable Car Line

On August 2, 1873, Hallidie launched the world’s first cable car system: the Clay Street Hill Railroad.

This groundbreaking line proved that cable-powered transit could successfully navigate San Francisco’s steep terrain. Instead of relying on animal power, cars used a mechanical grip to latch onto a moving cable underground, allowing them to glide smoothly up and down hills.

The innovation quickly captured public attention—and demand.

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🚀 A City Transformed

Following the success of the Clay Street line, cable car systems spread rapidly across San Francisco.

By the late 19th century:

Dozens of routes crisscrossed the city
Cable cars became the backbone of urban transportation
The system helped shape the city’s growth and accessibility

For a time, San Francisco operated the largest and most advanced cable car network in the world.

@stmblog
They didn’t build cable cars for fun… 👀 They built them because horses were dying on San Francisco’s hills. 🚋 The real story is wild https://stmdailynews.com/how-san-francisco-got-its-cable-cars-the-story-behind-an-icon/ NowYouKnow SanFrancisco HistoryTok UrbanHistory DidYouKnow ♬ original sound – STMDailyNews – STMDailyNews

⚡ The Rise of Electric Streetcars

Despite their success, cable cars faced competition from emerging electric streetcar systems in the early 20th century. Electric trolleys were cheaper to build and operate, and they didn’t require the complex underground cable infrastructure.

The turning point came after the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which destroyed much of the city—including large portions of the cable car network.

When rebuilding began, many lines were converted to electric systems instead of restoring the older cable technology.

San Francisco’s cable car system, first launched in 1873, remains the last manually operated system of its kind. According to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) , the system was designed to safely navigate the city’s steep terrain.

The cable cars are now designated as a National Historic Landmark, recognized for their cultural and engineering significance by the National Park Service .

Visitors can explore the history and mechanics of the system at the San Francisco Cable Car Museum , which preserves original equipment and archives.

🛑 Saving a Symbol

By the 1940s, cable cars were on the brink of extinction.

That’s when Friedel Klussmann stepped in. A passionate preservationist, Klussmann led a public campaign to protect the remaining lines from being dismantled.

Her efforts culminated in a successful 1947 voter referendum that ensured the survival of San Francisco’s cable cars—transforming them from everyday transit into a preserved cultural landmark.

🌉 Cable Cars Today

Today, San Francisco’s cable cars are:

The last manually operated cable car system in the world
A National Historic Landmark
One of the most visited attractions in California

Three lines remain in operation:

Powell–Hyde Line
Powell–Mason Line
California Street Line

While they still function as public transit, they now serve as a moving museum—connecting modern riders with the city’s past.

🎯 Why It Matters

San Francisco’s cable cars represent more than a mode of transportation. They tell a story of innovation, resilience, and community action.

From solving a practical problem to becoming a global icon, the cable car system reflects how cities adapt—and how people fight to preserve what makes them unique.

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📌 “Now You Know”

San Francisco’s cable cars weren’t built for tourism—they were invented to solve a life-and-death problem on steep city streets. Today, they remain the last system of their kind anywhere in the world.