Anyone else remember that O. Roy Chalk bought the D.C. trolley system in 1955 and tried to promote it, but the D.C. government, WaPo and the Senate District Committee refused to allow that, and replaced it with buses? Picture D.C. today with an electric above ground system instead of those fuming behemoths - of course, now there’s the Metro, but it makes occasional stops only - and we might have still had both.

So last night I chanced by PBS’s History Detectives, on a review of how the Cleveland, OH trolleys suffered a similar fate. Then watched in horror as the report pointed out that the very political personages who’d worked to let go of the trolley to the gas belch had later been rewarded by GM. Of course, collusion was never proven, but the pattern occurred in one city after another.  Read more