Center Entrance in Boston - Part 2, Continued
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Part 1 - Introduction
Part 3 - Boston Center Entrance Cars
Part 4 - Boston Center Entrance Car Characteristics


New York Railways Stepless Car. The center-entrance idea was percolating elsewhere as well. Earlier in the year, the New York Railways Company had introduced the era's all-time low-floor champ. Billed as a "stepless" car, it came to be known as the "hobble skirt" car because of the ease with which it accommodated ladies who boarded while wearing the tight-fitting hobble skirts in vogue at the time. The car's designers, General Manager Frank Hedley and Superintendent of Car Equipment, J.S. Doyle, achieved the still impressive feat of having a stepless floor throughout the entire passenger compartment reached by a single 10-inch step up from the street. Key elements were the specially designed maximum traction trucks and their placement close to the ends of the car body. Each truck had one axle with 30-inch diameter wheels and another with only 19-inch diameter pony wheels. A single motor powered the larger-wheeled axle, and the truck was rotated so that the smaller wheels were pointed toward the car center. This enabled the car floor to gently slope up to 16" above the rail before disappearing under the semi-circular bench seat at each end of the passenger compartment. The motor, larger wheels, and body bolster (itself depressed 19" in the center instead of running straight across the car body) were tucked up under the seat and the separate motorman's compartment. The truck's bolster also was made lower than normal by suspending it from the truck's semi-elliptic springs instead of resting it on them. It was the kind of spatial engineering employed in today's efforts to produce easy-access cars for the mobility impaired, efforts that in many ways are a continuation of the center-entrance story.

The Electric Railway Journal heralded the car's comfort and convenience to the riding public, and observed that the "absence of overhanging platforms is a feature that will unquestionably reduce danger to pedestrians when the cars are rounding curves...." It did not mention, however, that the unusually long 29'-0" distance between truck centers, which made these things possible, might be impractical in cities like Boston where older, narrow winding streets might not be able to accommodate the resulting sideswipe of the body's long mid-section when rounding a turn, or the potential for the low floor to hang up on the crest of a hill. On New York's long, relatively flat and straight Manhattan grid-iron thoroughfares, these were not problems.



Hedley-Doyle Stepless Car. Electric Railway Journal.

One curious aspect of the car's design was the 3'-10" wide door opening, which was surprisingly narrow for a center-entrance car. Perhaps the narrowness was in part a structural consideration, since the stylish low roof line reduced the amount of steel stiffening that could be put above the door opening while the spread of the truck centers increased the effective length of the wall/girder and the resultant stress at the center door area. Perhaps also, New York's traffic patterns provided a more uniform, lighter peak entry/exit congestion than elsewhere, leading the designers to assume a greater door width was not required. (In use, the doors proved to be too narrow, which noticeably slowed the boarding/exiting process.)

In any event, the car was widely used for a while, principally by the New York Railways, which had 176 of them, and by the Southern Pacific Company, which had 36. It was soon joined by an experimental, short-lived double-decked car tried in New York and Columbus, Ohio, aptly nicknamed the "Broadway Battleship" for its large, armor-plated appearance.



New York Railways “Broadway Battleship.” Electric Railway Journal.

For all it achieved, the New York center-entrance car's extreme design brought about its early demise when the financially troubled New York Railways turned to one-man operation in the twenties. Unchangeable, the cars were replaced by obsolete box cars that could be easily converted to one-man operation.

Brooklyn Car. Within weeks of the New York car's introduction came the announcement from a neighboring borough that a center-entrance car was under construction for the Brooklyn Rapid Transit System. Said to be two years in the works, it was less radical than the New York car, having conventional maximum traction trucks centered more comfortably at 24'-8", and a floor that sloped gently 6" down from its high point above the truck (30" above the rail) to a 10" step down into a center well that extended across the car width. This well, 6'-6" wide to match the generous door opening, was a single 14" step above the rail and sloped upward 2" from doorway toward the center line of the car. The well also provided a clear demarkation of the prepayment center vestibule nature of this part of the car. Of the many center-entrance cars developed, the Brooklyn car was perhaps the closest in general concept to the eventual Boston car.



Brooklyn Rapid Transit center-entrance car. Electric Railway Journal.

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