Trolleys on Grand Avenue to roll again?
From CityCircles, 2010-08-09:
…The Grand Avenue Rail Project (GARP, for short) is a plan to connect the modern [METRO] rail route with a relic from the city’s transportation past: a restored 82-year-old streetcar, part of the original Phoenix Street Railway system, which, if funded, will one day roll west down Van Buren and make a wide right on Grand to retrace its original path down the center of the storied street…
What’s more, Graham proposed, they could actually run the trolley that’s already been restored there (and the second in the works) up and down Grand, without a lot of additional construction.
“The great thing about this idea is, because the streetcars were here before, it’d be relatively easy to do it again,” says Graham, looking out on the lightly traveled street just outside his office window, where the railway system ran until 1948. “My civil engineer found out that no utilities were ever put in under the street, and the median is just wide enough to accommodate the streetcars without reducing the traffic lanes. So all they’d really have to do is cast a strip of concrete with a couple of rails in it and extend a single overhead electrical cable down the middle, and you’re done!”
Rest of the story: http://citycircles.com/posts/437