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July 25, 2004

Canal and Galvez, 1964

The leaves have returned to the trees on Canal and the spring flowers are blooming. Other changes are taking place on Canal Street as well. The inside auto lanes on either side of the neutral ground have been widened in anticipation of bus service on the Canal Street line. The new concrete on the outbound side of the street is visible at right. There’s a bus just visible heading riverbound, most likely just leaving Canal Station to head uptown to the start of its route.

Two Perley Thomas cars have just passed each other. The one in the foreground is heading towards the river and the one in the background is heading towards the cemeteries. NOPSI still used two-man operation at this time; single-man operation did not start until the 1970s.

When NOPSI made the case to the city to discontinue the Canal line in the early 1960s, one of the reasons put forward was that the wooden electrical poles could be removed from the Canal Street neutral ground. Unlike the new line’s metal poles, the old Canal line relied on wooden electrical poles that towered high above the streetcars. The notion of getting rid of those unsightly poles was yet another nail in the Canal line’s coffin. (Photo courtesy of Earl Hampton).

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July 18, 2004

Canal and Carrollton

Von Dullen Car 2011, turning from N. Carrollton Avenue onto the riverbound Canal track, for a run into downtown. Unlike the original Canal line, the modern line includes a spur that branches off at N. Carrollton Ave. and runs down Carrollton to City Park, where it ends in a two-track terminal.

This is the first time in New Orleans history that streetcars have run on N. Carrollton Avenue. The neutral ground on Carrollton isn’t big enough to handle two-track operation, so the cars run in the inside traffic lanes along the spur. The spur services riders from the neighborhood and brings visitors staying downtown out to City Park and the New Orleans Museum of Art. It’s also not that far of a walk to St. Louis Cemetery Number Three on Esplanade Avenue or Pitot House on Moss Street. A rider with a VisiTour 1-day or 3-day pass can also re-create the days of the Canal Belt line by transferring to the Esplanade bus and riding back downtown along the tree-lined avenue that is the downriver boundary of the French Quarter.

For those who don’t want to immediately return to the CBD, N. Carrollton Avenue offers a host of restaurants, cafes, shops, and tourist sites. We’ll be featuring a number of these both here on the website and in the CanalStreetCar (dot com) Weekly newsletter.

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July 11, 2004

The Canal Barn

The 2000-series streetcars that run on the Canal line are stored at the huge A. Philip Randolph SIS (Storage, Inspection, and Service) facility, located at Canal and N. Gayoso Streets. The first streetcar facility on this site was constructed in 1861 by the New Orleans City Railroad Company, to store their Canal streetcars and house the mules that pulled them. That’s one of the reasons these facilities are called “barns,” because they actually were animal barns prior to electrification.

The buildings of the original Canal Station faced directly on Canal Street. Since the bus garage and office buildings now occupy those spots, some of the bus parking in the rear of the facility was allocated for the car barn. The barn is accessible by two tracks from Canal. Like Carrollton Station uptown, streetcars enter the Canal barn from the rear and exit in the front.

The Canal barn is designed to store the Von Dullen cars and perform light maintenance; major work on the streetcars will be done at Carrollton Station, since that’s where the shops and fabrication teams are located.

This photo was shot from the Canal Street entrance to the barn area. The entrance track is on the right; you can see it makes a sharp right turn to run parallel to the barn. The track then curves left so cars can switch onto the proper barn track. The exit track is on the left of the photo, with a crossover in between. The extensive catenary wire overhead enables the streetcars to make use of all the trackage in the barn.

Unlike Carrollton Station, all the barn tracks are on RTA property. There is a wall separating the barn from N. Gayoso Street, for the safety of the neighborhood, particularly the students of Randolph’s neighbor, Warren Easton High School.

For more information on the Randolph SIS facility and the original Canal Station, check out the Randolph SIS page.

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July 04, 2004

The 1929 Strike

Motormen and conductors walked off the job on July 1, 1929, unable to come to terms with NOPSI on a number of non-salary issues. By July 3, 1929, traffic was starting to seriously stack up on Canal Street. The strike was peaceful for the first couple of days, with NOPSI re-routing some buses in an attempt to provide some level of service. In this photo, the bus in the bottom left hand corner has “ESPLANADE BELT” written in white in the windows, because it’s standard running board (which says “CITY PARK”) didn’t have the signs for the streetcar lines. On July 5th, NOPSI tried to resume streetcar service with managers and supervisors serving as motermen and conductors. Violence erupted, resulting in Palace car 696 being turned over and burned on Canal Street. There were incidents of vandalism reported at several spots along the Canal line, and many NOPSI facilities, including Canal Station, were damaged by strikers.

The strike was a drawn-out affair, with the motormen and conductors coming to an agreement-in-principle in August, and a full settlement in October. The strike had a major impact on transit ridership, which dropped by 40 million riders in 1929, when compared to 1928.

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