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(Click the trolley map to enlarge it)
Trolleys – or street cars, as they were also known – existed in
American cities before the Civil War, but a line did not connect
Washington, D.C., to Rockville, Maryland, until 1900. Nine years
earlier, the Tennallytown & Rockville Electric Railway Company
opened a line from Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown just above the C&O
Canal to Bethesda Park, an amusement destination in Alta Vista (off
Old Georgetown Road, near present-day NIH). The popular park was
severely damaged in a hurricane on September 29, 1896, and never
repaired.
In
1897, the Washington & Rockville Electric Railway Company formed to
bring street cars as far north as the County seat. By 1900, tracks
led to Courthouse Square, but the Mayor and Council of Rockville
refused to permit service inside the town to begin until the W&R
fulfilled its agreement to build the last section to the western
limits of the town, to the Woodlawn Hotel (later rejuvenated as
Chestnut Lodge Sanitarium).
The
agreement between the town of Rockville and the W&R Railway Co. ran
for 35 years. From 1900 to 1935, street cars plied the track from
the Washington terminus at Wisconsin and M Streets, N.W., up
Wisconsin and then Old Georgetown Road, over a steel trestle just
before the cars approached Georgetown Prep, through dense woods at
Montrose and onto the Rockville Pike, through Rockville on
Montgomery Avenue, to Laird Street, and back again. The cars could
be driven from either end. In 1929, W&R ran 24 trips a day between
6:30 a.m. and 12:30 a.m. to connect Rockville and Washington.
Major stops along the line included Georgetown, Alta Vista,
Bethesda, Montrose, Halpine, the Fairgrounds, Courthouse Square, and
Chestnut Lodge. Six switching stations and side tracks enabled
street cars to pass as they went in different directions. In
populated areas, street cars kept speeds to 12 mph (6 mph at
intersections), but in open country they could get up to 40 mph.
While street cars have not gone to Rockville for nearly 70 years, a
keen eye can spot signs of their presence today. Check out the
steel trestle on the south side of Tuckerman Lane, built to take
trolleys over the creek, and the old right-of-way parallel to the
Pike just north of Georgetown Prep. Many of the places Rockville
line travelers saw – Strathmore Hall, Montrose School, the Bradley
and Dawson farms, Walter Johnson’s house, Offutt’s store, Saint
Mary’s Church, and Courthouse Square – still exist.
Peerless Rockville holds in trust about 30
photographs on this subject and would like to see yours.
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