WHERE THE STREETCAR BENDS THE CORNER AROUND. In a recent European Tribune post, DoDo shows readers around the tram network of Budapest. The article opens with a picture of a new high-capacity six-section Siemens unit the locals call "giant caterpillar."


The unit is demonstrating the behavior I refer to in the post title. In Milwaukee, the expression, which may be an adaptation of a German phrase, originated in a radio comedy act. It could refer simply to the act of a streetcar going around a corner, although Milwaukee did have streetcars capable of bending the corner around.

This site, titled guess what? illustrates one such unit. Milwaukee Electric took a large fleet of turn-of-the-twentieth century streetcars and rebuilt them -- at their Cold Spring Shops -- into three-truck articulated cars, doubling the productivity of a two-man crew.

Robert Genack photograph
West Allis Station, 8 January 1932.

By the Depression, more productive cars would be hauling more empty seats around and using more electricity. These units were placed in storage and subsequently scrapped.

Milwaukee Electric also bought some duplex streetcars new from St. Louis Car. These were originally intended for the South Milwaukee suburban service (a very long tram route from downtown Milwaukee via Kinnickinnic Avenue and Packard Avenue practically to the Racine County line) but they did most of their work during the war. Afterwards they were reconfigured for rapid transit service to Waukesha and Hales Corners.

The Wisconsin Electric Railway Historical Society image.

Budapest also operates trackless trolleys (known elsewhere as "trolley coaches" and colloquially in Milwaukee as "trolley buses.") There is some discussion of them here, and regular readers are familiar with the St. Petersburg Tram Collection's trolley bus models.



Budapest, however, still has its streetcars and trolleybuses. The best I can offer for Milwaukee, apart from the well-known collections at East Troy and Union, are some old work of mine using a railroad-network simulation called Bahn. The program is shareware and free downloads will time out once the grace period expires. But an owner can look at other peoples' networks or build his or her own. The Milwaukee network, based on the fall 1929 timetable, is available as a free download here. (Download the Bahn program first, unzip it, then save the network files to the Bahn network subdirectory.)

(Cross-posted at European Tribune.)