page_title: West End Street Railway
section_title: Electrification
hierarchical_section_title: West End Street Railway / History / Electrification
caption_attribution_description: English: The Central Power Station for the West End Street Railway at Albany Street, built 1889-91.
context_page_description: The West End Street Railway was a streetcar company that operated in Boston, Massachusetts and several surrounding communities in the late nineteenth century.
  Originally an offshoot of a land development venture, the West End rose to prominence when it merged several independent streetcar companies into a single organization, and over the next decade it was the primary operator of public street transit within the Boston area. During this time, the company maintained one of the largest street railway systems in the world, the first unified streetcar system in the United States, and first electrified system in a major US city.
  The West End remained in independent operation until 1897, when it leased its entire line to the Boston Elevated Railway. It was formally consolidated into the Boston Elevated in 1922.
context_section_description: Following the completion of consolidation, the West End began to pursue the possibility of electrifying the system in order to improve performance and cut operating costs. To assess the practicality of mechanization, Whitney and general manager Daniel Longstreet made exploratory visits to several cities including Richmond, Virginia, where Frank Sprague had recently developed the first practical electric trolley line in the country. The success of the Richmond system convinced Whitney and Longstreet of the benefits of electrification, and the West End soon afterwards contracted with Sprague to build an experimental line in Boston.
  At first, the company experimented with both overhead lines and ground-level conduits for power, but the latter was quickly abandoned when found to be impractical. After conducting test runs in late 1888, a line running between Boston and Brookline was opened on the first day of 1889, while a second line to Cambridge commenced operations on February 16. Within a few months the company was prepared to make electrification general and a contract was executed with the Thomson-Houston Electric Company to equip the entire West End system. The conversion inspired Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.'s 1891 poem The Broomstick Train, or The Return of the Witches, in which he imagined the streetcars being propelled by the Salem witches with their broomsticks as the trolley poles. Horsecars would stop at any point upon passenger request, which became impractical with increased service; as lines were electrified, the West End designated stopping points with white-painted bands on poles.
  By the end of 1892, electric trolleys accounted for two-thirds of total car mileage, while by 1894 they constituted over ninety percent of the total. Just five horsecar routes remained by the end of 1895. By the time the final pair (on Marlborough Street in the Back Bay) were discontinued on December 24, 1900, the only other horsecar operation in the state was a short line at Onset.
caption: Central power station in the South End for the electric lines, built 1889-91
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