Ramsey County History – Fall 1983: “Tom Lowry and the Launching of the Street Railway System”

Tom Lowry and the Launching of the Street Railway System
Author: Goodrich Lowry

The writer’s theme is that public mass transportation has never paid for itself. St. Paul introduced horse cars in 1872, and they failed twice in the first ten years. Later, cable cars served to increase debt, and expensive conversion to electric-powered cars arrived 1890. Minneapolis businessman Thomas Lowry took control of the city railway in 1882 with a variety of investors and persistently heavy debt and held it until his death. In order to raise the huge sums of money needed for operations, Lowry merged the two city systems into Twin City Rapid Transit Company in 1891. It became profitable only at the end of the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, TCRTC expanded to Lake Minnetonka on the west and White Bear Lake to the east, where it built the Wildwood Amusement Park. After years of declining ridership, the streetcar system died in 1954 and was replaced by buses.
PDF of Lowry article