The Pacific Electric Railway originally provided reliable transportation across more than 1,000 miles of track. Postwar society's affair with the automobile led to the loss of an infrastructure that could have formed the basis for an enviable modern light-rail system, one that current society would be happy to utilize. Authors Steve Crise and Michael Patris look back at the railway and its landscape today. Both serve on the board of the Pacific Electric Railway Historical Society, from whose archives most of these images are taken.

Of the rail lines created at the turn of the 20th century, in order to build interurban links through Southern California communities around metropolitan Los Angeles, the Pacific Electric grew to be the most prominent of all. The Pacific Electric Railway is synonymous with Henry Edwards Huntington, the capitalist with many decades of railroad experience, who formed the "P. E." and expanded it as principal owner for nearly its first decade. Huntington sold his PE holdings to the giant Southern Pacific Railroad in 1910, and the following year the SP absorbed nearly every electric line in the fourcounty area around Los Angeles in the "Great Merger" into a "new" Pacific Electric. Founded in 1901 and terminated in 1965, Pacific Electric was known as the "World's Great Interurban."

One of the most colorful yet neglected eras in American transportation history is re-created in this definitive history of the electric interurbans. Built with the idea of attracting short-distance passenger traffic and light freight, the interurbans were largely constructed in the early 1900s. The rise of the automobile and motor transport caused the industry to decline after World War I, and the depression virtually annihilated the industry by the middle 1930s. Part I describes interurban construction, technology, passenger and freight traffic, financial history, and final decline and abandonment. Part II presents individual histories (with route maps) of the more than 300 companies of the interurban industry. Reviews "A first-rate work of such detail and discernment that it might well serve as a model for all corporate biographies. . . . A wonderfully capable job of distillation." —Trains "Few economic, social, and business historians can afford to miss this definitive study." —Mississippi Valley Historical Review "All seekers after nostalgia will be interested in this encyclopedic volume on the days when the clang, clang of the trolley was the most exciting travel sound the suburbs knew." —Harper's Magazine "A fascinating and instructive chapter in the history of American transportation." —Journal of Economic History "The hint that behind the grand facade of scholarship lies an expanse of boyish enthusiasm is strengthened by a lovingly amassed and beautifully reproduced collection of 37 photographs." —The Nation

Local rail-borne transit in Los Angeles began with horsecars in 1874, evolving with cable-powered and later electric-powered passenger vehicles. "Yellow Cars" describes the principal local transit system in and around Los Angeles in the first half of the 20th century. The canary-colored local streetcars formed the inner-neighborhood lines between a vast rail network of main lines known as the "interurban" system, primarily the Pacific Electric Railway "Red Cars," which spiderwebbed throughout Los Angeles County and into Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties. Rail tycoon Henry Edwards Huntington consolidated several independent lines into this great interurban empire. He sold it in 1910 to the Southern Pacific Railroad, keeping the Los Angeles Railway Yellow Cars. These evocative photographs illustrate travel during decades of change, progress, economic setbacks, war, and postwar retrenchment, when streetcar service was taken over by bus lines.

"This volume explores the colorful stories of a lifelong railfan and founding member of the Orange Empire Traction Company (today, the Orange Empire Railway Museum or OERM).