Customer Reviews

Pacific Electric Red Cars (Images of Rail: California)

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is done by the Historian for METRO in Los Angeles and makes liberal use of Pacific Electric original files and photos which are a part of METRO'S historic archives. It is an outstanding book. and a must have for trolley, interurban, and light rail fans.

Although there's a plethora of books written about PE, I would recomend this title for those who are uninitated to Pacific Electric.
This book gives a very fact ridden synopsis of one of the US's busiest passenger and freight hauler.
Thew ran 9300 (!) scheduled passenger trains and had a large LCL box motor operation. Yhat's in addition to 100's of electrically/steam/diesel hauled freight trains throughout the LA Valley area.

All this ran on 900 miles of right of way, including the famous Watts 4 track raceway and the subway terminal caddy corner to the elevated PE Terminal in the above mentioned terminal building.

Many foreign car manufacturers use the terminal building as a "modern" backdrop for their car ads. Talk about longevity!!!

Photos run from excellent to very good and still sharp, except very old ones that are technically limited so.

This book is one of Arcadia's Regional Titles. For the most part they are all excellent. I got the one on Queens county and found out that a streetcar line ran through mostly back yards from Flushing NY to Jamaica NY. That explains the wide street on 164th St, which would otherwise be a narrow Queens street. No other source published this type of information.

if you want a good primer, but not every nut and bolt in PE's history, this is agood place to start.

I'm astonished by Pacific Electric's complexity and comprehensiveness of passenger and freight services. My only regret is that I never rode on it. I was born too late! A book that every railfan cannot miss.

I grew up in Pasadena and saw the trolly car tracks being torn out of the ground and the right of ways abandoned. With a little bit of investigation, pre-Internet, I easily learned of the company that was created and funded by Standard Oil, General Motors, and Firestone Tire, with the express purpose of buying up all the electric street car lines in the country and converting them to bus routes using fuel from Standard Oil and tires from Firestone to run the General Motors coaches. This conspiracy made it to the US Supreme Court but by then the damage was largely done.

Instead of environmentally benign electric street cars in major cities throughout the country we now have buses belching out diesel fumes and polluting the air we breathe and contributing to global warming. Even if cities wanted to restore electric street cars, such as are found in almost every city in first world countries other than the United States, the cost to purchase the right of way makes this prohibitively expensive.

This is the sort of whitewash of history that helps explain the profound ignorance of so many "educated" people in this country. I am surprised and dismayed that the book was written by someone who professes to be a historian.