Recently in Facilities and Structures Category

George Friedman pointed out that I've been using inaccurate terminology when referring to the Randolph facility on Canal Street. The A. Phillip Randolph facility includes a streetcar SIS (Service, Inspection, and Storage) component. So, the entire facility is not the SIS, just the car barn.

Here's a shot of the SIS, better known as the Canal Barn, from two weeks ago:

clicky the image for a much higher resolution.

You can see the 900s that are not being used on the Canal line at that moment in the barn. The doors to the service bays to the left in the photo are closed.

The New Orleans Regional Transit Authority's struggle to get the city's transit system back up and running has been slow and sluggish for the last two years. The city's main bus service and storage site, the A. Philip Randolph SIS facility on Canal Street, was flooded with several feet of water. Not only did this ruin the "red ladies," the 400- and 2000-series streetcars, but it ruined dozens of buses as well as creating a hazmat situation because all of the oil, fluids, etc., in the service bays of the garage spread all over the facility.

Two years later, Randolph is cleaned up and operational, with the 900-series streetcars operating out of the Canal barn in the rear of the facility. The green streetcars running on Canal has returned the "tourism" face to the system, and that presence will expand when the repairs and upgrades to the St. Charles line are completed next year.

Bus transit, on the other hand, has been problematic. Ridership has dropped from around 3 million per month prior to the storm to 550K-575K now. While the decrease in local population is certainly a huge factor in that drop, the lack of operational buses contributes as well. Consultants hired by RTA lay the picture out clearly:

Ideally, the RTA should have 100 fully-functioning buses to serve its reduced customer base, officials from Booz Allen and GCR & Associates said. The consultants said that number should increase to 122 buses by next year and to 240 buses by 2012, when they expect ridership to return to pre-Katrina levels on many routes.

That's a tall order, given that RTA has about 60 operational buses, which are a combination of their own equipment that survived the storm and buses that have been loaned or donated to them. RTA has FEMA money that will enable them to purchase another 12 buses. There's still a lot of work to be done.

A shot from the mid-1990s, when RTA was evaluating the use of PCC trucks for the Riverfront line. You can see the PCCs next to and in front of Car #29, the last of the Ford, Bacon & Davis streetcars from 1895-1898. From Mark Kavanaugh of Kavanaugh Transit. Thanks for use of the photo, Mark!

Carrollton Station

Carrollton Station is the oldest RTA facility in the city. Built in 1893 by the New Orleans & Carrollton R.R. Co., it has serviced streetcars, trolley buses, and diesel buses. Today, Carrollton Station is the main service and construction facility for all three of RTA’s streetcar lines. The barn is located between Willow and Jeanette Streets, from Dublin to Dante Streets.

This Earl Hampton photo shows three Von Dullen cars at various stages of assembly in 2003. The cars were built from scratch at Carrollton Station, in the shop building closer to Dante Street. After being painted, the cars were then moved to the maintenance tracks in the main barn, which is where they are in this photo. Car 2008 has its trolley poles installed, but the monitor deck and A/C unit are not yet in place on the roof.

Now that the Von Dullen cars are in service, their home is the A. Philip Randolph SIS facility on Canal Street. Carrollton Station now looks more like it did in the 1970s, when all it serviced was the St. Charles Line. All of the “red ladies” of the Canal and Riverfront lines call Canal Street their permanent home. The 2000- and 400-series cars do come back to Carrollton Station for overhauls and major repairs, though.

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.

Farewell to the Cemeteries Bus Line

As the last Canal streetcar switched from the Canal tracks to the St. Charles line on the morning of May 31, 1964, a fleet of General Motors “new looks” buses was already rolling on Canal, bringing morning commuters downtown from the cemeteries in air-conditioned comfort. The current fleet of Flixable buses servicing Canal Street will leave the city’s transit hub on the morning of April 18, 2004, when revenue service for the Canal streetcar is planned to begin.

The buses won’t leave with the fanfare the streetcars received in 1964, but RTA and the members of the Amalgamated Transit Union who operated the Cemeteries line are to be commended for a fine job. One can argue that a bus ride is not nearly as historical or romantic as a streetcar ride, but the people of the city weren’t looking for romance in the early sixties. They were looking for something much more basic.

There are a number of theories as to why streetcar lines across the country were discontinued in favor of buses, but there’s no grand conspiracy behind the discontinuance of the Canal line. By the 1960s, NOPSI’s fleet of Perley Thomas cars was old and in terrible shape. The company, already beginning what was to be two decades of losses in the Transit division, did not want to make the financial investment required to renew the streetcars. They preferred eliminating the streetcars and using the capital to buy buses which could be then used anywhere in the NOPSI transit system. They dangled two carrots in front of bus riders. The first was a big one: air conditioning. Summer heat and humidity made the streetcar ride down Canal to the CBD a rough one for men and women dressed for work in the city’s office buildings. The prospect of being able to get to work without having seat through your clothes was irresistible.

The second offering from NOPSI was also quite enticing. By switching Canal from streetcars to buses, the company was able to extend the Canal line into the new Lakeview subdivisions of Lake Vista and Lakeshore. This meant that Lakeshore residents (the neighborhood running roughly from West End Blvd. to Canal Blvd, out by Lake Pontchartrain) would be able to get on a bus right near home and ride it all the way to St. Charles Avenue without having to transfer from bus to streetcar at the cemeteries. NOPSI sweetened the deal by planning two “express” lines to run the same routes as the regular extended lines. The express lines would not stop once they reached the cemeteries until they got to Claiborne Avenue.

The city took the bait, despite the cries of preservationists who wanted to save the Canal streetcars. The one consolation the preservationists got in that Spring of 1964 was that NOPSI was required to keep the St. Charles streetcar line running and had to put money into its restoration and upkeep.

A. Philip Randolph SIS

RTA’s massive Randolph SIS (Storage, Inspection, Service) facility, located at Canal and N. Gayoso Streets, is the permanent home for the streetcars of the Canal and Riverfront lines.

The Randolph facility was constructed on the site of the original Canal Street barn, first built in 1861 by the New Orleans City Railroad Company. The original barn serviced the Canal line throughout its entire lifespan, and was converted fully to a bus facility in 1964. The building was torn down in 1992 and the current facility was constructed.