Ohio

Cincinnati Streetcar Heritage is a photographic essay of the Cincinnati, Ohio, streetcar system. Cincinnati's first electric streetcar line was the conversion of the Mt. Adams & Eden Park Inclined Railway Company cable car line to electric operation in 1888, which became part of the Cincinnati Street Railway Company in 1896. Because of concern over corrosion of underground conduits and water pipes, Cincinnati's streetcar lines were required to have a double overhead wire within city limits. Cincinnati, along with Merrill, Wisconsin, and Havana, Cuba, were the only streetcar systems in North America with a double overhead wire system. Two open observation streetcars were placed in sightseeing service during 1939. The only Presidents' Conference Committee (PCC) cars ever built with two trolley poles were operated in Cincinnati. Although Cincinnati's streetcars made their last run in 1951, the Toronto Transit Commission purchased 52 of Cincinnati's PCC cars with the last one taken out of service in 1982. Cincinnati Streetcar Heritage documents the city's streetcar era, including the Cincinnati Bell Connector streetcar line which opened in 2016, linking downtown Cincinnati with the Over the Rhine neighborhood.

The self-described "rubber capital of the world," Akron was the home of numerous rubber factories that made tires for America's burgeoning automobile industry. Many of the raw materials needed to create rubber arrived by rail, and the finished products moved to market in freight cars. The city's major railroads included the Baltimore and Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Erie Railroads, but three regional carriers, the Akron, Canton and Youngstown, the Wheeling and Lake Erie, and the Akron and Barberton Belt, also served Akron-area industries. Written in cooperation with the Akron Railroad Club, this book chronicles the ever-changing Akron railroad scene since the club's founding in 1936.

In the six decades preceding 1960, Akron's network of railroads had been relatively stable. Then a series of mergers began that year, changing the face of the city's railroad network. By the early 1970s, the industrial base--particularly the rubber industry--that had sustained the region's economy was in decline, and the fortunes of the railroad industry fell with it. The self-described "rubber capital of the world" was hit hard, and the production of tires for the automotive industry all but disappeared. The 1960s also saw a precipitous decline in rail passenger service, with the last passenger trains discontinued in 1971. A restructuring of the railroad industry that began in the mid-1970s left the Akron region with three railroad companies. Some railroad lines were abandoned, while others saw the scope of their operations changed or reduced. Today's rail network in Akron may be slimmer, but the railroads are financially healthy and continue to play a major role in meeting the region's transportation needs.

In nearly a century of heavy rail travel in Ohio, a dozen train accidents stand out as the most horrific. In the bitter cold, just after Christmas 1876, eleven cars plunged seventy-five feet into the frigid water below. The stoves burst into flames, burning to death all who were not killed by the fall. Fires cut short the lives of forty-three people in the head-on Doodlebug collision in Cuyahoga Falls in 1940 and eleven people in a train wreck near Dresden in 1912. Author Jane Ann Turzillo unearths these red-hot stories of ill-fated passengers, heroic trainmen and the wrecking crews who faced death and destruction on Ohio's rails.