Who, what, when, where, why and how. You have questions about the area where we live, and we try to answer them in our feature OKI Wanna Know. This week, a couple of questions about a local long-gone streetcar system.
Much has been written about Cincinnati's streetcar. Not the current one, but the system of electric streetcars that dominated the local transit scene for years. Today, you can still find old streetcar rails peeking out from potholes in asphalt around Cincinnati. But what about Northern Kentucky?
"Oh yes. There's places in Newport where you can still see the rails. They're not going to tear up the rail if they don't have to. They just paved over top of it."
That's Jason French. He's curator of collections at the Behringer Crawford Museum in Covington. He says like Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky communities had an elaborate system of streetcars.
"There were a lot of places to go that you could get to on a streetcar. Part of the reason the streetcar system was built was because of places like Ludlow Lagoon, which was an amusement park. In Dayton, Kentucky, there were beaches where you could swim at the river. There's Latonia Racetracks," French says. "So often the end of the line was at some form of amusement in Northern Kentucky."
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French says the lines started out as omnibuses, or horse drawn, but by the 1890s they were all electric. The system was eventually consolidated into what was called the Green Line.
"And that transitioned of course into the Green Line Bus system that is now the Transit Authority of Northern Kentucky, or TANK," he says.
TANK today does run a bus along the riverfront and across the water into Cincinnati. The Southbank Shuttle looks like a trolley car. Which leads to our first question, from Veen Bristow.
"A few years ago I learned there used to be several rail car lines that crossed the river to get passengers to Kentucky. Where did these go? Are there any maps of where all of them are?"
The Green Line did cross the Ohio River. The Behringer Crawford Museum has a map of streetcar lines from 1914 to 1934. The map shows passenger rail over the Central Bridge, which was replaced by the Taylor Southgate, and the L&N, which we now call the Purple People Bridge. French says those spans were used until about 1921, when everything was centralized onto one bridge.
"They did use the Suspension Bridge, and if anyone is old enough to remember even riding a bus across the Roebling Bridge, what happened to streetcars and later to buses, (they'd) cross the bridge and went directly into the back of Dixie Terminal," he says. "Then they would turn around and come back into Covington and throughout Northern Kentucky."
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Before then, you could get on a streetcar in Newport, cross the Ohio River, and go as far as 4th and Vine, or 5th and Walnut.
But, this story is about Northern Kentucky streetcar routes.
French says the rails stretched all over. From Dayton in the east, to Bromley in the west. Fort Mitchell, Latonia, Highland Heights, and Southgate were all connected. Which leads us to our next question from Joe in Fort Thomas. He asked if "Memorial Parkway used to be a street car rail from Newport to Fort Thomas?"
French says it appears so. He says that's how the streetcar got up the hill.
"The grade of the road is important when you're dealing with rails just because the streetcars can't pull themselves up steep inclines," he says. "Pittsburgh has inclines, Cincinnati had inclines. But in Northern Kentucky the grade was such we could pull our way out without having to have an incline."
The last Green Line streetcar stopped running in July 1950.
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"It was a streetcar called 'The Kentucky,' which had been converted into basically a parlor car — it was a party car. You could rent it. It had been the private limousine of the president of the streetcar company. He had decided he liked that car and made his own for a while," French says.
The Kentucky was built around 1894 and is now on display at the Behringer Crawford Museum in Devou Park, along with a map of all of the Green Line routes.
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