page_title: History of rail transportation in California
section_title: Buses replace streetcars and interurbans
hierarchical_section_title: History of rail transportation in California / 20th century / Buses replace streetcars and interurbans
caption_attribution_description: From Report on Interurban Electric Railway for the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, November, 1933. I love this picture.
context_page_description: The establishment of America's transcontinental rail lines securely linked California to the rest of the country, and the far-reaching transportation systems that grew out of them during the century that followed contributed to the state's social, political, and economic development. When California was admitted as a state to the United States in 1850, and for nearly two decades thereafter, it was in many ways isolated, an outpost on the Pacific, until the First Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869.
  Passenger rail transportation declined in the early- and mid-20th Century with the rise of the state's car culture and road system. It has since undergone something of a renaissance, with the introduction of services such as Metrolink, Coaster, Caltrain, Amtrak California, and others. On November 4, 2008, the People of California passed Proposition 1a, which helped provide financing for a high-speed rail line.
context_section_description: Passenger rail in California during the early 20th Century was dominated by private companies. The San Diego Electric Railway, founded by John D. Spreckels in 1892, was the major transit system in the San Diego area during that period. In the Los Angeles area, real estate tycoon Henry Huntington established both the Los Angeles Railway, also known as the Yellow Car system, and the Pacific Electric, also known as the Red Car system, in 1901. The San Francisco Municipal Railway was established in 1912. Business magnate Francis Marion Smith then created the Key System in 1903 to connect San Francisco with the East Bay. The San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge opened to rail traffic in 1939 only to have the last trains run in 1958 after fewer than twenty years of service – the tracks were torn up and replaced with additional lanes for automobiles. All four streetcar systems, and other similar rail networks across the state, declined in the 1940s with the rise of California's car culture and freeway network. They were then all eventually taken over to some degree, and dismantled, in favor of bus service by National City Lines, a controversial national front company owned by General Motors and other companies in what became known as the General Motors streetcar conspiracy. San Francisco's city-owned lines were not privatized, but were still largely converted to bus and trolleybuses.
caption: Schematics for the Yerba Buena Tunnel (looking west), showing the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge's original configuration featuring a double-track interurban railway (lower right). November, 1933
exif: {}