Newark
retires old-style streetcars
By AMY WESTFELDT
Associated Press Writer
August 24, 2001
NEWARK, N.J. --
Garry Furnari remembers walking with his mother to the Newark City Subway platform to go shopping in the city, dropping the coins into a machine, holding his ears before the screech of the wheels.
"It was as exciting as any amusement park," said Furnari, a state senator who turned out with hundreds of rail buffs Friday to say goodbye to the city's old-style trolley cars after 47 years.
The blue, white and gray, electrically powered steel trolleys began operating on Newark's 4.3-mile subway route (only 1.2 miles are underground) in 1954, after the Public Service Coordinated Transport agency bought them for $11,666 apiece from Minneapolis' transit system.
The 19,000 riders who use the system each day have complained about how much the noise the cars make and the lack of air conditioning. But NJ Transit's executive director, Jeffrey Warsh, said that the cars were reliable, running continuously except for one two-week stretch in 1999.
"They're beautiful, and they're simple and they work," Warsh said Friday.
The 24 cars, which were going to take nostalgia buffs for free last rides Friday night before their retirement, will be replaced on Monday with 16 Japanese light rail cars. The new cars are air conditioned, heated, handicapped-accessible and carry up to 188 people, more than twice as many as the old rail cars.
A few of the old trolley cars, known as PCC cars after the Presidents' Conference Committee that helped design them in the 1920s, are still on the tracks in a handful of cities, including San Francisco and Boston.
Three of the New Jersey cars are going to the New Jersey Transportation Heritage Center in Phillipsburg. The other 21 are up for grabs, Warsh said, although he wants the cars to go to New Jersey projects.
Jan K. Lorenzen said he was interested in adding some of the NJ Transit cars to the 12 or so he has in storage in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he hopes to start a rail line from the Red Hook neighborhood to the Brooklyn Bridge.
"I'd love to take a couple back, and all the spare parts I can carry," said Lorenzen, 40, who said he's been fascinated with streetcar lore all his life and has built an 8-by-24-foot model train layout of old streetcars at his home.
Mark Kavanaugh, 34, traveled from Salem, Ore., to say farewell to the streetcars and to buy a commemorative T-shirt and coin. He works at a transit museum.
"They have the classic looks and sounds of a traditional streetcar," Kavanaugh said of the PCC cars. "I prefer electric motors over diesel motors."
The purchase of the new subway cars is part of a five-year, $188 million renovation project that will also extend the line another mile into Bloomfield and Belleville this fall and connect Penn Station in Newark to its Broad Street station in four years.
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