Taken for a Ride

Some recent road work close to home unearthed a section of streetcar track, a remnant from an era where every American city worthy of mentioning had its own (private and profitable) surface rail transportation  system.  That era ended with the acquisition of the Baltimore system, along with scores of others, by a holding company called National City Lines (NCL) that proceeded to tear up the tracks and replace the streetcars with vastly inferior buses.

This episode (more like tragedy) is well documented in the movie “Taken for a Ride”, a film I finally got to see this past weekend when a spare 90 minutes fell into my lap.  Check out the movie here and then read in more detail about how the Philadelphia system succumbed  here.