Boston's First Electric Sreetcar Line:Allston-Brighton 1888

One of the most important events in the transportation history of Boston, the first electric-powered streetcar ride, occurred here in Allston-Brighton in December 1888.
Boston was not the first city in America to introduce electric- powered streetcars. That distinction belongs to Baltimore, which acquired a system in 1885, but the City by the Bay was not far behind.
Since the 1850s, Boston had been served by a network of horse-drawn lines which employed some eight thousand animals. Horsecars, as these vehicles were called, had some serious disadvantages. First, the draft animals had to be fed and to be cared for, which involved considerable expense. In addition, the cars moved slowly and extra teams had to be employed to get them over steep grades. Also, overworked horses sometimes died in harness. And finally, epidemics of bovine fever forced occasional service shutdowns.
And there was, of course, the problem of disposing of the huge quantity of dung that the horses deposited on the city's streets. The average droppings per horse amounted to ten pounds a day and much of it was left to dry and mix with the air. Some historians attribute a rise in the incidence of tuberculosis in 19th century American cities to the dried air-borne dung that residents were breathing.
Electric powered streetcars, by contrast, were pollution-free. They also ran much faster than horsecars (10 to 15 miles per hour as compared to 5 or 6 for animal powered vehicles). Also, they could carry more passengers per trip, making it possible to offer the public cheaper fares. And finally, the electric-powered system enjoyed important long-term economic advantages, for once the initial high installation costs were met, there was no heavy, long-term expenses to be borne.
The first step toward the introduction of electric streetcars in Boston came in 1887 when Brookline developer Henry M. Whitney consolidated virtually all of the horsecar companies of Boston into the West End Street Railway Company, which later (in 1897) became the Boston Elevated Railway.
Whitney was fascinated by the possibility of substituting electric-power for horsepower. With that goal in mind he visited Richmond where experimentation with electric power was underway. There he made the acquaintance of inventor-engineer Frank J. Sprague, and decided to award the Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company a contract to electrify a line running from Allston's Braintree Street to Park Square in the Back Bay.
Branches of this first electric streetcar line also ran up Beacon Street from Coolidge Corner to the Chestnut Hill Reservoir and from the Allston powerhouse to a carbarn in Oak Square.
How did the people of Allston-Brighton respond to the proposal that an electric streetcar line be established in their community? Local businessmen and landowners were quite supportive. Samuel Hano, who owned a large book bindery in Allston, as well as some half million square feet of local real estate, gave the project a powerful endorsement, as did Horace Jordan, a former Brighton Selectman and a co-founder of the Brighton Abattoir.
Meanwhile Henry Lee and Henry M. Stanwood of Brookline circulated a petition to require the West End Street Railway Company to put all of its electric lines into underground conduits. Regrettably, businessmen Hano and Jordan refused to support this effort, fearing that the added cost of an underground system might jeopardize the electrification project. In the end, the Boston Board of Aldermen permitted the company to erect utility poles in Allston-Brighton, while requiring that Back Bay lines be placed underground. Brookline's lines were likewise placed underground.
There was apparently no organized opposition to the electrification proposal in Allston-Brighton. The local paper, the Brighton Item, in fact, predicted that electric streetcar service would lead to "the commencement of another boom in the already well-inflated real estate interests of the district," and also, that a second electric line would soon be built on Chestnut Hill Avenue to spur the development of that section of town. In the latter prediction the paper was, of course, quite mistaken.
In the fall of 1888 a power station and a hundred foot square car barn were constructed on Braintree Street, near the Allston Depot. On December 1, the Item noted of the recently completed power station, that its most notable feature was a hundred foot chimney. The facility contained two Armington & Sims pattern 200 horse power engines, driven by four Edison dynamos, having a maximum pressure of 500 volts apiece. These were operated by three horizontal tubular boilers, furnished by the Jarvis Engineering Company.
The inauguration of electric powered streetcar service in Boston is traditionally dated from a formal ceremony held on December 31, 1888, when an electric-powered car traveled from the Allston car barn to Boston's Park Square. My research reveals, however, that the first trip on the line actually occurred a month earlier, on Saturday, December 1, 1888, consisting of a test run from Oak Square to Allston, and then out to Beacon Street and back.
A description of this initial trip appeared in the Item on December 8, 1888:


Within a few months, the West End Street railway was operating twenty-eight miles of electrified track in the downtown, Brookline, Brighton, and Cambridge.
All the West End Street Railway's power at this early stage was supplied from the Braintree Street power station. Later, additional stations were built in East Cambridge and Harrison Avenue in Roxbury---the later being the system's central power facility.