page_title: Streetcars in Washington, D.C.
section_title: The switch to electric power
hierarchical_section_title: Streetcars in Washington, D.C. / History / The switch to electric power
caption_attribution_description: English: Repairing streetcar tracks, Fourteenth and G Streets, N.W., Washington, D.C.
context_page_description: Streetcars in Washington, D.C. transported people across the city and region from 1862 until 1962.
  The first streetcars in Washington, D.C., were drawn by horses and carried people short distances on flat terrain; but the introduction of cleaner and faster electric streetcars, capable of climbing steeper inclines, opened up the hilly suburbs north of the old city and in Anacostia. Several of the district's streetcar lines were extended into Maryland, and two Virginia lines crossed into the district. The city experimented briefly with cable cars, but by the beginning of the 20th century, the streetcar system was fully electrified. By 1901, a series of mergers dubbed the "Great Streetcar Consolidation" gathered most local transit firms into two major companies. In 1933, a second consolidation brought all streetcars under one company, Capital Transit. Over the next decades, the streetcar system shrank amid the rising popularity of the automobile and pressure to switch to buses. After a strike in 1955, the company changed ownership and became DC Transit, with explicit instructions to switch to buses.
context_section_description: Horsecars, though an improvement over horse drawn wagons, were slow, dirty and inefficient. Horses needed to be housed and fed, created large amounts of waste, had difficulty climbing hills and were difficult to dispose of. Almost as soon as they were instituted, companies began looking for alternatives. For example, the Washington and Georgetown experimented with a steam motor car in the 1870s and 1880s which was run on Pennsylvania Avenue NW near the Capitol several times, but was never placed in permanent use.
  In 1883, Frank Sprague, an 1878 Naval Academy graduate, resigned from the Navy to work for Thomas Edison. He wound up in Richmond, Virginia, where, on February 2, 1888, he put into service the first electric-powered streetcar system. After 1888, many cities, including Washington, turned to electric-powered streetcars. To get electricity to the streetcars from the powerhouse where it was generated, an overhead wire was installed over city streets. A streetcar would touch this electric wire with a long pole mounted on its roof. Back at the powerhouse, big steam engines would turn huge generators to produce the electricity needed to operate the streetcars. A new name was soon developed for streetcars powered by electricity in this manner; they were called trolley cars.
caption: Underground conduit system at 14th & G Streets, NW
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