Presbyterian College > Academic Web Server > Jon Bell > Transit > (Cities | Types) > Philadelphia > 2000 Trip

Philadelphia Trip Report
7 March 2000

[The following is based on a posting to the newsgroup misc.transport.urban-transit in March 2000.]

As part of a trip to Washington DC, I took a day trip to Philadelphia via Amtrak, mainly to tour the electric trolleybus (ETB) routes. Like Boston, Philadelphia calls these "trackless trolleys". There are currently five ETB routes, in two completely disconnected systems that operate out of separate depots:

                      Interval (min)    Approx.
                     -----------------  Length
   #  Name            Mid-day     Peak  (miles)  Depot
  --  -------------  --------  -------  -------  -------
  29  Tasker-Morris        20       10      2.9  Southern
  59  Castor               15       10      3.9  Frankford
  66  Frankford             8      4-6      5.8  Frankford
  75  Wyoming              20       15      4.4  Frankford
  79  Snyder               15       10      2.8  Southern

(Distances are one-way; I measured them quickly from a map without trying to account carefully for every little wiggle.)

That morning, I somehow managed to wake up without an alarm clock at 5:00 so as to shower, dress, and ride the Metro to Washington Union Station in time to buy a ticket, newspaper and breakfast before catching the 6:30 train to Philadelphia. Arriving at 30th Street station about 8:30, I spent a few minutes wandering around to orient myself before heading to the SEPTA Regional Rail platforms to catch a train to Center City.

My plan was to stop first at SEPTA headquarters on Market Street, buy a day pass, and visit their Transit Store before setting out for my sightseeing. So I got off at Market East, walked over to SEPTA HQ, and found that (a) the Transit Store didn't open until 10:00 (it was now about 9:15), and (b) the Customer Service desk didn't sell passes; for that I would have to go back to the Market East station.

Back at Market East, I bought my pass. SEPTA's day pass is different from any others that I have seen. It's a small folder ([outside] | [inside]) with an undated peelable sticker inside. When you first board a bus or enter a rail station, the driver or station agent peels off the sticker and affixes it to a standard paper transfer ([front] | [back]), which bears the current date and thereby activates the pass. The transfer is rather flimsy, so I kept it tucked inside the folder. At rail stations, I opened the folder and flashed the pass to the agent, who always nodded and unlocked his turnstile. Bus drivers, on the other hand, were inconsistent: some simply waved me aboard, but others insisted on punching a hole in the pass as if it were an ordinary transfer. Towards the end of the day my pass began to look like a piece of Swiss cheese. :-)

Pass in hand, I set off on my explorations. First I headed west on the Market Street subway to City Hall, then south on the Broad Street subway to the end of the line at Pattison. The subway was extended here in 1973 to serve a cluster of sports stadiums. I emerged from the subway briefly to take a picture of a couple of the subway exits near the Philadelphia Phillies baseball stadium.

Then I rode back north a couple of stations to Snyder, to meet my first ETB route for the day, the 79 Snyder. This route runs east and west across South Philadelphia on a mostly-commercial two-lane street, with parking on both sides, intersecting Broad Street about in the middle of the route. Near the west end of the route is a stretch of row houses. I rode all the way to the west end, got off and took a few pictures within a few blocks' distance, then boarded another bus and rode most of the way towards the east end. At Front Street I walked a few blocks north (about 5-10 minutes at a brisk pace) to the terminal of the 29 Tasker-Morris route.

Route 29 also runs east and west across South Philadelphia. but it does so on parallel one-way streets a block apart: westbound on Tasker Street and eastbound on Morris Street. At Broad Street, the Tasker-Morris subway station straddles the block in between. Both streets are mainly residential, with a few stores at intersections. They're both narrow: only one traffic lane, with parking on both sides. Along the sides are narrow sidewalks with continuous rowhouses behind them. Looking down the cross streets, one also sees continuous rowhouses. Overall, the effect is somewhat claustrophobic, and very different from Snyder Avenue. West of Broad Street, the landscape becomes rather depressed, and I would not want to walk around much alone in this area. Near the west end of the route are a couple of schools, and a parked police car nearby made me feel better about waiting at the bus stop for my return trip.

Routes 29 and 79 are both based at the Southern District depot on Oregon Avenue, which runs east-west about a third of a mile south of Snyder. Non-revenue wires connect to routes 29 and 79 at 22nd and 23rd Streets, northbound and southbound respectively. I passed these on Snyder and on my return trip on Morris.

I returned eastbound on Morris only as far as Broad Street, where I transferred to the subway to return to Center City. (I thereby did only 3/4 of a round trip on both routes 29 and 79.)

By now it was shortly after noon. I returned to SEPTA headquarters and visited the Transit Store, which has a nice selection of transit-oriented books, videos and souvenirs. I bought SEPTA's current city and suburban transit maps, a couple of videos, Gerry William's book "Trains, Trolleys & Transit: A Guide to Philadelphia Area Rail Transit" (highly recommended), and a mouse pad with SEPTA's rail map (just the thing to convince my colleagues that I'm totally crazy :-). I had also planned to eat lunch, but everyplace was crowded with office workers on lunch break, so I decided to press on and grab something to eat along the way later.

I re-entered the Broad Street subway and headed north on an express train to the end of the line at Fern Rock. This is the only place where the Broad Street line runs above ground, so I got off and walked part way around the perimeter of the Fern Rock Transportation Center, taking pictures of the trains and the yard through the fence. I saw another guy taking pictures through the fence, but I didn't have the nerve to introduce myself. (If he's reading this, I was the guy with the beard and the Cleveland Indians cap, around 1:30 pm on Tuesday March 7.)

Then I rode south on a local train to Wyoming to connect to the 75 Wyoming ETB route. On emerging from the subway, the first thing I saw was a Burger King, so I went there and ate lunch, after which I took a picture of an ETB crossing the intersection, then boarded an eastbound one. To the west, route 75 extends a short distance to the Wayne Junction Regional Rail station via a one-way loop through Nicetown; I skipped this section. To the east, the route runs across north Philadelphia to the Margaret-Orthodox station on the Market-Frankford elevated rail line (designated as "Arrott Terminal" because the bus terminal is on Arrott Street).

The part of Philadelphia along route 75 is more pleasant than I expected, and contrasts sharply with the South Philadelphia areas that I had just visited. It has rows of detached houses with small lawns instead of continuous rowhouses adjacent to the sidewalk, and is much tidier than South Philadelphia with its piles of litter. The intersection of Broad and Wyoming would fit right into a small midwestern city, with the Burger King on one corner, a freestanding Rite-Aid drugstore with parking lot on the other side of Wyoming, and a large church with parsonage diagonally opposite from the Burger King. Schools were letting out right about now, so my bus had to crawl through speed zones, and picked up a number of pre-teenage children.

Along the way the route passes a section where practically all the houses have been razed, leaving mostly empty fields. If I remember the story correctly, this land was once an ash-dumping pit or something like that, and at some point the ground started to settle so much that it seriously damaged the houses that had been built on it. The city finally cleared everybody out of the neighborhood.

At Arrott Terminal I took a picture of two ETBs on routes 59 and 75 side by side with the elevated station in the background. Then I boarded the next 59 Castor bus. This route first runs out Oxford Avenue, a broad tree-lined residential street, then loops around Oxford Circle and heads straight out Castor Avenue. Although Castor is mostly commercial, it has a fair number of houses, including some impressive-looking rowhouses with stone fronts instead of the usual brick. If I had had more time, I would have gotten off here to take some pictures of ETBs passing in front of those rowhouses.

Instead, I stayed on to the end of the line at Bustleton Avenue, which is labeled "Bells Corner" on the timetable. Unfortunately for me, the bus destination signs don't say "Bells Corner," nor could I find any other signs nearby with that name. After taking a couple of pictures of ETBs at the loop, I realized that it was getting rather late in the afternoon, and I still wanted to see the 66 Frankford route. Looking at my timetables, I saw that bus route 28 on Rhawn Street (a short walk away) crosses both Castor and Frankford, so I figured that I might be able to save some time by using that bus to get to Frankford Avenue instead of riding 59 all the way back to Arrott Terminal.

Therefore, I walked down to the corner of Castor and Rhawn and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, after over twenty minutes, I gave up and boarded the next inbound 59 trolley. At least I got another picture of a route 59 trolley at the intersection while I was waiting. Back at Arrott Terminal I climbed to the Margaret-Orthodox elevated station (which has been nicely renovated recently), and rode north to the next station, the end of the line at Frankford Terminal. (Routes 59 and 75 are connected to Frankford Terminal by non-revenue wire that runs under the elevated along this stretch.)

Frankford Terminal is about to be renovated, but as of now it still looks rather seedy. The route 66 Frankford ETBs stop at the north end of the elevated station, and as you wait for your bus, you can look at the ETB and diesel bus storage and maintainance facility on the other side of the bus boarding lane. But you don't have to wait very long, especially at rush hour, because route 66 has the most frequent service of all the Philly ETB routes.

Route 66 also has something unique in U.S. ETB operations: both local and express service during rush hour, with four sets of overhead wires running out Frankford Avenue as far as Rhawn Street. I wanted to get a picture of an express, so I decided to ride a local out a ways, get off and wait for an express to come along. This section of Frankford has two traffic lanes in each direction, a center turn lane, and parking on both sides. The local wires run over the outer traffic lanes, and the express wires run over the inner traffic lanes. As I rode out, I wondered how the express stops worked, because the trolley poles wouldn't reach from the express wires to the curb. As we approached Cottman Avenue (the first express stop), I saw the answer: the express wires merge to the right and join the local wires, so that only two sets of wires actually pass through the intersection; the express wires split off again after the intersection.

A few blocks past Cottman I got off and waited for an express to come past. I ended up seeing two, one inbound and the other outbound, but both were using the local (outer) wires. By now it was too late to go any further, because I had to get back to 30th Street to catch the 6:56 train to Washington; and it was starting to get dark anyway. So I boarded an inbound local back to Frankford Terminal. After we passed Cottman, I saw another express coming the other way, this time using the express wires. They must have been using the express wires up to Cottman, and the local wires past that point, but I don't know why.

[A couple of months after I wrote the above, I finally found out why the express wires weren't being used beyond Cottman. A closer look at the route 66 timetable revealed that there are two kinds of express trips: express to Cottman and express to Rhawn. Only one trip per weekday operates express to or from Rhawn. So what I saw was in fact standard operating practice (at least at present), and I simply happened to ride too far out in my quest to photograph an express.]

Back at Frankford Terminal I took a few more pictures, then at 6:00 boarded an elevated train which took me back to 30th Steet. The trip back to Washington was mercifully uneventful; on a similar excursion last year to Newark NJ, the train broke down a few miles short of Washington Union Station and we had to sit in the dark for an hour until another locomotive came out and towed us in. Arriving back at the hotel around 10:00, I ate a sandwich for supper and plopped into bed, pleasantly exhausted.

This page was last updated on 13 May 2000, and reviewed on 27 May 2005.

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