LOCAL

Electric streetcars in Topeka retired in 1937

Tim Hrenchir
threnchir@cjonline.com
This photo provided by the Kansas State Historical Society shows a streetcar operating in Topeka in the 1930s. [Kansas State Historical Society]

As workers dug up S. Kansas Avenue six years ago for a project to improve downtown Topeka, they found remnants of a bygone era: Tracks that carried electric streetcars that once provided public transportation.

This week's History Guy video at CJOnline.com tells about those streetcars, which ground to a halt 82 years ago.

"Earth's Greatest," said the top headline published above a Topeka Capital-Commonwealth article published in April 1889, one day after the Rapid Transit Railway Company made its first run here with a streetcar powered using overhead lines that provided electrical current.

The headlines below said the trial trip had been a "grand success" and described the electric railway as "wonderful."

Up until then, street cars running on rails in Topeka had been pulled by horses or mules, or powered by steam.

Streetcar rides cost 5 cents until the fee was raised to 6 cents in 1919, according to a publication issued in 1969 by the Shawnee County Historical Society.

But it became clear that the days of the streetcar were numbered after the Topeka Railway Company, which already offered streetcar service, began offering bus service in 1925.

The end of the city's electric street railway system was reported in an article published in July 1937 in The Topeka Daily Capital.

"Topeka's electrical streetcars passed into history yesterday as they retired for the more modern buses," it said.

The article said the railway company's 20 streetcars had been sold to a junkyard to be dismantled.

The city's transit service paid homage to the streetcars in the 1980s when it began operating "Topeka Trolley" vehicles, which resembled them. The last Topeka Trolley was sold off in 2012, according to Capital-Journal archives.