The Electric City: Scranton's Trolley Revolution

You are rolling into Scranton, Pennsylvania, a city whose entire identity was forged in fire, steam, and coal. They call it the Electric City, and that nickname is more than a marketing slogan. In eighteen eighty-six, a streetcar powered entirely by electricity made its maiden run along Franklin Avenue, from the corner of Lackawanna Avenue all the way out to the Green Ridge neighborhood. Charles Van Depoele's system carried the passengers. What happened that night launched a revolution in American city life.

Scranton was not the first city to experiment with electric rail, but it was the first city in the country to build a streetcar system designed from the start to run solely on electric power. Within a year, Scranton had earned the nickname, and riders were boarding cars every fifteen minutes. The overhead wires eventually laced many miles of track across the city and its surrounding communities. The little wheeled device that collected current from those wires was called a troller, and that word is said to have given us the name everyone still uses today: trolley.

The power that ran those cars came, in no small part, from the coal that lay directly beneath Scranton's streets. The city was burning its own foundation to light its way forward. That irony never fully resolved itself. For nearly seven decades, trolleys were the circulatory system of everyday life here, carrying miners to pit heads at dawn, silk-mill workers to their looms, schoolchildren, shoppers, and families to church on Sunday mornings.

The last trolley ride in Scranton ran in December of nineteen fifty-four. A motorman took passengers home to Green Ridge along the very same route Van Depoele had opened sixty-eight years earlier. By then, the coal beneath the streets was nearly gone, the iron works had closed, and the silk mills had gone quiet. The trolley's end was also Scranton's farewell to its industrial golden age.