The Scranton Suburban Railway Company

Scranton had relied on horse-drawn trolleys since 1865, when the city chartered its first horsecar operation. Two decades later, Edward B. Sturges formed the Scranton Suburban Railway Company, with Colonel George Sanderson as secretary, and broke ground on July 6, 1886, on a line powered entirely by electricity.

The company contracted with the Van DePoele Electric Manufacturing Company to supply the electrical apparatus. Charles J. Van Depoele, a Belgian-born inventor who had built his first electric railway in Chicago in early 1883 and demonstrated the trolley pole at the Toronto Industrial Exhibition in autumn 1885, designed the system. C.E. Flynn handled the on-site electrical installation. By November, the line through Green Ridge was complete.

Car No. 4

The rolling stock was built by Pullman. Each car measured sixteen feet long and seated twenty-six passengers, thirteen to a side, in a body painted deep maroon. Incandescent electric lamps lit the interior. An enclosed front platform housed the motor, which the driver controlled by turning a crank. A sixty-horsepower generator at the power station supplied current to the overhead wire, and the railway paid the electric power company nine dollars per day for the service.

The Test Run

On November 29, 1886, Van Depoele arrived for the test run. With Flynn in charge of the motor, he took the controls of Car No. 4 at Franklin Avenue and Lackawanna Avenue. The car headed toward Spruce Street and Adams Avenue, covering five blocks in four and a half minutes. The Scranton Republican reported the car reached twelve miles per hour. Then a short circuit in the motor brought the trip to an abrupt stop.

Van Depoele returned the next day.

November 30, 1886

The first commercial run departed from Franklin Avenue, just off Lackawanna Avenue, on the morning of November 30. Motorman John Williams held the controls and conductor John Cawley worked the car as it carried a load of city dignitaries and newspaper reporters through downtown. Sidewalks along the route filled with onlookers watching Car No. 4 roll past.

The route ran along Wyoming Avenue to Spruce Street, past the courthouse, then onto Adams Avenue and up the hill into Green Ridge, a distance of two and a half miles. Fare was five cents, a fraction of the twenty-five cents that horse-drawn trolleys charged, and service ran from seven in the morning until midnight. A Pennsylvania state historical marker, erected in 1948 at the courthouse, calls it the “first street car system in the U.S. built entirely for operation by electric power.”

What Made It First

Other cities had experimented with electric traction before Scranton. Montgomery, Alabama, launched its Lightning Route on April 15, 1886, seven months earlier. Van Depoele himself had operated demonstration lines in several cities, and by the end of 1887, thirteen North American cities had electric railways, nine of them designed by Van Depoele. But these earlier systems were hybrid operations. Montgomery still used mules alongside its electric cars.

The Scranton Suburban Railway was the first built to run solely on electric power, with no horses stabled for breakdowns and no steam standby.

Van Depoele did not stay long in Scranton. He held at least 243 United States patents between 1881 and 1894, and in early 1888 he sold his motor business and patents to the Thomson-Houston Electric Company. He died on March 18, 1892, in Lynn, Massachusetts, at forty-five.

Growth and Consolidation

The system expanded steadily through the 1890s from that single Green Ridge line, eventually reaching 110 miles of track with a car running every fifteen minutes. In 1896, five separate railways consolidated into the Scranton Railway Company: the Valley Passenger Railway, Scranton Passenger Railway, Dunmore Railway, Scranton Suburban Railway, and the Scranton Railway Company (formerly the People’s Street Railway).

The combined system served city lines in Scranton and Dunmore alongside suburban routes that reached as far north as Forest City and as far south as Duryea and Pittston. By 1900, it carried 10.5 million passengers across almost 100 miles of track in what was then Pennsylvania’s third-largest city. The American Railways Company purchased the system in 1905, and the fleet grew to more than 100 cars. Ridership peaked at 24 million passengers in 1912. Rev. David Spencer, D.D., pastor of Penn Avenue Baptist Church, saw the trolley wires running over the city’s streets and declared Scranton “The Electric City.”

Decline

By 1934, the Scranton Railway had already begun replacing trolley routes with buses, which needed no overhead wire, no power stations, and no track maintenance. The company reorganized as the Scranton Transit Company that year, and the conversion continued route by route over two decades.

The last trolley ran on December 18, 1954. The Green Ridge line, the original 1886 route where Car No. 4 stopped on its test run, had operated continuously for sixty-eight years. Bus service continued under the Scranton Transit Company until a strike on November 15, 1971, shut down all operations. The city went nearly a year with no public transit before the County of Lackawanna Transit System launched in 1972.