“Interurban open at last” reads the headline on a full-page story inside Tacoma’s Daily Ledger.
On Sept. 26, 1902, the newspaper printed the sizable “Story of the run of the first train out of Tacoma.” A day earlier, an unnamed reporter had participated in the inaugural train ride along the Puget Sound Electric Railway Co.’s spanking new line between Tacoma and Seattle.
The story leads with these words: “At precisely the hour of 6:45 o’clock yesterday morning Conductor Charles H. Steece sang out, ‘All aboard,’ and with the sibilant hiss from the air brakes and a shriek from the whistle, car No. 502, the first car to run on a regular schedule, slowly started from the waiting station at the corner of Seventh and A Streets and the Tacoma-Seattle Interurban line was open for public travel.”
At the turn of the century, Boston-based utility and transportation giant Stone & Webster Management Co. consolidated nearly two dozen Western Washington streetcar franchises.
Among the purchases was an incomplete rail line between Tacoma and Seattle, which the company finished in 1902 through its local subsidiary, the Puget Sound Electric Railway Co.
The day-after story included a mile-by-mile description of the first 36-mile ride to the Seattle terminus. It included a half-page, hand-drawn map of the route showing towns that no longer exist as towns: Stuck, Christopher, Thomas, O’Brien, Orilla, Black River and others.
The train passed through Edgewood at 7:20 a.m., according to the article, which described the area as “a city of tents about 11 miles from Tacoma.”
“Nearly every variety of scenery is presented,” the story reads, “from long runs over level stretches where the engineer ‘turns her loose’ to deep cuts and sharp curves where the run is made under a ‘slow bell.’”
Only 10 passengers took that first ride, on a small two-car train built to hold 80 people.
A power failure in Seattle caused “serious delay,” and the ride ended after 9 a.m. with “officials of the company” stating that “the road is in operation really before it should be” and that “the time between the two cities will be greatly improved within the next two or three weeks.”
The railway operated for 26 years, carrying nearly 3 million passengers during its peak year, 1919, according to a Ledger story in 1928. That year, the line’s final year in operation, the line carried just under 1 million riders.
The paper printed good-bye editorials in its Dec. 30 and 31 editions – the day of and the day after the final run of the final train. The Dec. 30 piece, titled “Passing of an Old Friend,” referred to the reason for the line’s demise:
“The popularization of the automobile sounded the death knell of the Puget Sound Electric. As passenger cars increased, there was a falling off in the patronage of the trains. … Like all things that have served their purpose and have been superseded by something more convenient, the interurban has had to go.”
Public and civic attempts to restore the line to its original grandeur and usefulness failed. On Feb. 8, 1929, The Ledger reported that past employees of the railway were contemplating bidding on the line at auction and putting it back in operation.
“There has been considerable dissatisfaction with the discontinuance of the interurban expressed in small communities along the line which claim that they cannot get adequate service from the bus line,” according to the paper. “This dissatisfaction would be a capital asset for any organization which might attempt the continuance of the interurban.”
But in 1930, wrecking crews began tearing up the tracks. On Sept. 21 of that year, The Ledger reported: “Hope that eventually some ‘godfather’ would come along and, with probably more cash than he knew what do with, buy up the tracks and equipment of the defunct … railway and again put the line into operation was finally extinguished … when work of tearing up the rails got underway just east of Tacoma.”
Recently the route has been revived in a form you might recognize: the path of the Sounder commuter train.
Still, it was a long road. According to Historylink.org, “Following World War II, local urban planners and reformers made repeated attempts to recreate a regional rail transit system to counteract suburban sprawl and growing traffic congestion.”
However, mass-transit measures failed at voting booths in 1958, 1962, 1968 and 1970. King County voters approved forming Metro Transit in 1972, and in 1988 endorsed an “advisory ballot for accelerated development of a rail system,” according to Historylink.
In 1995, voters in Pierce, King and Snohomish Counties rejected a $6.7 billion Regional Transit Authority proposal for light rail, commuter rail and express buses. But a scaled-back, $3.9 billion Sound Transit plan was approved Nov. 5, 1996.
At 6:20 a.m. on Sept. 18, 2000, almost 98 years after the inaugural run of the first trains along the old interurban railway, the first Sounder commuter train rolled out of Tacoma and headed for Seattle.
The next day, The News Tribune, echoing the 1902 Ledger article, reported that “Critics were scarce to nonexistent aboard Sounder during the train’s inaugural rush-hour run into Seattle on Monday morning.”
Bill Hutchens: 253-597-8460
blogs.thenewstribune.com/gritcity
