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From Horsecars to Streamliners By Alan Lind Over 400 illustration HARD COVER
From Horsecars to Streamliners By Alan Lind
400 pages over 400 illustrations index
annotated list of vehicles built St Louis Car Company
Copyright 1978
HARD COVER with dust jacket
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments3
Introduction6
Founding and Early Years: 1887-191010
New Products and New Markets: 1910-192042
Birneys and Doodlebugs: 1920-193054
Old Products Make a Comeback: 1930-194076
The PCC Car: SLCC's Most Successful Product96
Last Years of the Heavyweights: 1940-1950177
The Postwar Boom - And Bust: 1950-1973190
Parade of Products: Excerpts from Catalogs223
A Streetcar Named Worromontogus308
(Annotated job list, 1898-1973)
Index to Customers, Owners and Operators380
(Cross-indexed to job list numbers)
Bibliography396
Supplementary Information399
For nine decades a steady stream of vehicles flowed out the doors of a small factory on the north edge of St. Louis. Products of the St. Louis Car Company, they were destined to all parts of the United States and to many parts of the world. Horsecars, cable cars, and primitive electric streetcars were among the first products, followed by thousands of interurban cars, subway cars, trolley buses, and main line passenger and freight cars.
St. Louis Car Company quickly developed a reputation as The Quality Shops.- It also grew to be a leader in its field in terms of the number and variety of its products.
Since it was not unusual for a St. Louis-built car to run for 30 years or more, it was possible to see standard car types built many decades apart operating in the same city. For example, a large fleet of St. Louis-built narrow-gauge city streetcars roamed the streets of Los Angeles, sharing some dual-gauge track with standard-gauge interurban cars built by SLCC for the Pacific Electric.
In Chicago, handsome wooden "Palace" type cars of the early 1900s shared the streets with streamlined "Blue Devil" PCC streetcars, both types built by St. Louis Car Co. Pittsburgh and Philadelphia had large fleets of PCC cars built by St. Louis, and Toronto had the largest number of PCC cars of all - 745 - virtually all of which were built by SLCC. More than half of these cars are still in operation today, and are an important reason why Toronto is acknowledged to have the finest public transportation system in North America.
While St. Louis Car Company was primarily a builder of railroad and urban public transportation cars, it also built gasoline and electrically-powered buses, aircraft, automobiles, boats, and other vehicles. The Company converted to nearly 100 per cent military production during both World Wars, building thousands of vehicles for wartime use. To a lesser degree it furnished military materiel during the Korean War.
Although fairly small in physical and financial size, St. Louis Car Co. dominated important market segments: the lightweight car of the 1920s, the PCC car of the 1930s and 1940s. and the New York City rapid transit car market in the years after World War II.
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