31900 HD Old Pueblo trolley opening day Tucson Arizona

Shot by Nick Spark on Super 8mm equipment, this short silent home movie shows the Old Pueblo Trolley heritage streetcar line as service was inaugurated on April 17, 1993. Two trolley cars were available for service when the line opened, and were operated in the inaugural runs: Car 10, a 1918-built Birney-type car that was ex-Pacific Electric Railway 332 and was under lease to OPT from the Orange Empire Railway Museum, and car 255, ex-Osaka, Japan (Hankai Electric Tramway), which was built in 1953.

Car 255 had been in service in Osaka until June 1992.[1] The Birney car used a trolley pole, while the Japanese car used a pantograph, as it had on its home system. Before entering service, Birney car 10 was repainted from PE colors into the old livery of the former Tucson streetcar system, whose fleet had included an ex-Douglas, Arizona, Birney car of the same type, which was in service until the abandonment of the old Tucson system in 1930.

The line that opened as a heritage streetcar in 1993 used a combination of old, abandoned, paved-over track along University Avenue that was uncovered and rehabilitated, and new track along 8th Avenue and along 4th Avenue. Most of the line is two-way single-track, but it includes some double-track. Workers from Tucson Electric Power installed the overhead trolley wire, in some cases as volunteers.

Old Pueblo Trolley is a heritage streetcar system in Tucson in the U.S. state of Arizona, opened in 1993. The trolley last ran on October 31, 2011 before service was suspended during construction of the Sun Link modern-streetcar system.

Operating on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, Old Pueblo ran on just over a mile of single-track line recovered from Tucson’s original street railway. From its south terminus at 5th avenue and Broadway Boulevard the trolley ran north on 4th Avenue before heading east on University Boulevard to its terminus at Tyndall Street, just west of the University of Arizona Main Gate.

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