09-08-2012, 11:12 PM
|
|
|
Confirmed User
Industry Role:
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: In a refrigerator box by the tracks.
Posts: 4,790
|
Actually, I think it was the auto and tire companies that bought the trams and shut them down.
Quote:
|
In 1932 General Motors organized the United Cities Motor Transit (UCMT) company to buy trolley systems, convert them to shiny new GM buses and sell the franchises on the provision that the purchaser by replacements only from GM. UCMT converted three cities to buses by 1935 at which time the American Transit Association censured GM. In 1936, General Motors, Standard Oil of California, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, B. F. Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Manufacturing, maker of Mack trucks organized and financed National City Lines, a holding company. At this time, the United States still had 40,000 operating trolleys. National City Lines and its subsidiaries began to operate in the same fashion as UMCT: buying up trolley lines, pulling the cars out of service, tearing up the tracks, and converting to General Motors buses. Once the conversion was complete, the franchise holder would sell out with a provision precluding the return to electric transportation, and the process would begin again somewhere else. In this manner, National City Lines eventually eliminated forty-six systems in forty-five cities.
|
Link to entire article. |
|
|