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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
Boston “Snake Cars.” As center-entrance fever was spreading across the country - the Electric Railway Journal in 1912 and succeeding years was filled with announcements of this or that company ordering new center-entrance cars - Boston's planners pursued a unique, though related, course. The Boston Elevated needed additional cars with the passenger capacity of the semi-convertibles (159 for the Type 4 cars) it had been purchasing in recent years and was at the same time saddled with an inventory of 279 obsolete single-truck box cars. Some of these cars were spliced horse cars, others were standard 1890s cars with their open vestibules closed in. All were inefficient to operate because of their heavy weight per passenger and low passenger capacity for the fixed labor cost of motorman and conductor.
Boston’s “Two Rooms and a Bath” (or “Snake”) cars. Electric railway Journal.
The El's superintendent of rolling stock and shops, John Lindall, solved both problems with a clever contrivance. He fashioned a compartment that was suspended between and flexibly joined to two of the obsolete box cars. One end door of each box car was accessible through the compartment, which served as a center-entrance vestibule for the "new" articulated car thus created. Lindall's first version, tried experimentally in 1912, had a folding step outside the vestibule doors, just 11" above the rail. One step higher was the compartment floor. The car was placed in service in September and, by recorded passenger loading/unloading times at various stops, determined to be a success. The Electric Railway Journal in a March 29, 1913, article called it the "most novel design placed in service in urban traction work during the [previous] year." Lindall, who had previously patented the folding step in his 1904 "Easy Access Car" design for an experimental semi-convertible car, quickly patented the articulated compartment design. He then set about improving it. In early 1913 he unveiled the stepless version. Its floor was 14" above the rail and required a single step up from the street. Commenting, the Journal said:
This is an unusually low height of step, and the car may in fact be considered stepless in the same sense as the so-called stepless center-entrance cars now operating in Manhattan and Brooklyn Boroughs, New York City.
Inside, the floor extended the full width of the compartment and provided ample room for the centrally positioned conductor and farebox. Leading to each car end was a single, deep, 10"-high step that ramped upward 2" to a 5"-high step before the car door.
An interesting feature of the resulting "new" car was the use of the lead trolley pole for power collection, which resulted in both poles being pointed toward the center of the car rather than the ends. A hatch in the roof of the center vestibule compartment enabled the rope from each pole to pass through to the inside. When the hatch was raised, the conductor could lower or raise either pole without leaving the car.
With the essential design of the articulated conversions set, the Boston El produced 67 more conversions from single-truck cars in 1913 and 1914, and then set about making 22 conversions of double-truck cars from 1914 through 1918. Dubbed "snake cars" by the Boston Post, and referred to by many as "two rooms and a bath," the cars were particularly useful because of their ability to work the older Boston streets, many of which were narrow and winding. In some instances, load limitations on existing bridges also favored the use of these cars, particularly the latter ones which spread their weight over four trucks, or eight axles.
Negotiating Boston's sharp turns. Electric railway Journal.
The articulated program was one of expediency and relatively short duration. By 1925 all the articulateds had been retired, replaced typically by the newer Type 5 lightweights. As O.R. Cummings noted in Volume 5 of his detailed Street Cars of Boston series:
One thing that can be said about the snake cars is that everyone - both the riding public and the crews - hated them. There were constant problems; the cars were noisy on the street, and as the bodies became older and increasingly warped, creaking and groaning noises became almost continuous while the cars were running. Nobody, but nobody, was sorry to see them go.
<< First page < Second page
Part 1 - Introduction
Part 3 - Boston Center Entrance Cars
Part 4 - Boston Center Entrance Car Characteristics
Al
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�2006 Alfred Barten. All rights reserved.
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