Trolley

Trolley tracks found during construction of Kennedy Place on Atwood Ave. (2005)

From 1897 into the 1930s, electric streetcars were a familiar sight in Madison. Madison had its first electric “light rail” line that ran out State Street to Park Street and the university. The Madison Railways Co. ran lines that served the entire isthmus, from points as far east as Schenk's Corners and as far west as Forest Hill Cemetery and University Heights. The first cars held 24 riders, had skylight windows, fancy woodwork and coal-burning heaters for winter. They could go 30 mph, even accelerating up the King Street hill. Rides cost 5 cents. The system was privately owned by the controversial F.W. Montgomery, an Eastern capitalist who irritated local people with his spats, arrogance and crowded cars. Magazine editor B.B. Clarke complained in 1908 that in his 6th Ward, “our wives, sweethearts, sisters and grandmothers are treated little better than hogs” on the trolleys, and “men and boys have to cling to the edges and sides like chimney swallows.”

By 1912, the privately owned Madison Traction Co. operated three major lines: West Main to Baldwin Street, South Madison to East Johnson and Wingra Park to Fair Oaks.

Streetcar Paved The Way For New Subdivisions

In the years just before and after the turn of the century, several subdivisions were created on the periphery of Madison, enabled by the expansion of the streetcar line. One of these is the Highland Park subdivision just west of University Heights. The subdivision was convenient, accessible via the streetcar line that terminated by the Forest Hill Cemetery gate at its southeast corner. Without transportation to and from town growth to these outlying areas would have been much slower.

Bright yellow trolley cars hummed over shiny steel rails on concave asphalt streets during the streetcar era of the 1930s in Madison. Guide trolleys, tracking along overhead cables, snapped and cracked with electric sparks, passing through intersections, as streetcars headed to and from Capitol Square on West Washington Avenue, State Street and other main thoroughfares.

A referendum calling for the city to buy the trolley company failed in 1920, and the system was eclipsed by the advent of the automobile. During the 1930s, it began replacing trolley lines with GM-built buses. The developers of present-day Maple Bluff, Shorewood Hills and Nakoma set up buses to transport residents beyond the limits of the streetcar tracks. The streetcar system was torn up in 1935 and replaced by municipal buses with internal combustion engines. By 1946, National City Lines, a bus company funded and controlled by GM, Standard Oil and the Firestone tire company, operated public transit in more than 80 cities.