A Look Back at Trolley Cars and Their Tokens

Having covered earlier forms of getting around, namely horse-drawn contrivances, in his Coins magazine column, transportation token authority John M. Coffee, Jr. turned his attention to a more modern mode of transit, the trolley car. Below the title, “Numismatics of the Trolley Car” in the March 1965 issue, he wrote:

“All too few of us appreciate the decisive impact upon the growth of this country that was made by the trolley car. It made it possible for our towns to become cities, and for our cities to become metropolises.

“Remember this: it was the electric streetcar that made ‘rapid transit’ possible for the first time. Its predecessor, the horsecar, moved along scarcely faster than a man could walk. One didn’t take the horsecar to save time; one took it to save walking. And the by-products of its motive power lent a dubious fragrance to the streets.

“The electric streetcar, moving along at 20, 30, and even more miles per hour, made it possible to build homes farther and farther away from the center of the city. It carried the new suburbanites into the center of the city with cleanliness and swiftness, and its electric heaters were a comfortable improvement over the straw on the floor and the pot-bellied stove of the horsecar.

“The electric cars left their impact on the cities in other ways. Where two lines were crossed, and patrons had to wait to make a transfer, a store or two would be built to accommodate them, often a drugstore. These little neighborhood business districts usually remain today, much enlarged.

“They bridged the transit gap in America between the primitive and the modern, between the horse and the internal combustion engine. The modern bus itself has made no important contribution to America’s growth. It simply provides a less expensive, slightly more versatile substitute for the streetcar, with the added disadvantage that it contributes heavily to air pollution.

“It was, for example, a rare stroke of genius when Los Angeles, a city cursed with air pollution, decided to do away with all of its electric streetcars and substitute thousands of exhaust-belching buses.

“Today, electric streetcars remain, so far as I am aware, only in Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, New Orleans, Cleveland, Newark, Pittsburgh, and El Paso (where a single line operates across the boundary to Juarez, Mexico). There is also a free streetcar line in Fort Worth operated by a department store between its parking lot and the main store.

“Richmond, Va., in 1888, was the first city in this country to have a completely electrified streetcar system, built by a 29-year-old Naval Academy graduate named Frank Sprague. The success of the Richmond system allayed the fears of transit operators in other cities, whose skepticism was best characterized by the statement of one president of a horsecar system: ‘If you want to pull a car, you are going to have to put something in front of it to pull it,’ the sagacity of which comes a close second to the famous comment that ‘If God had wanted men to fly, He would have given them wings.’

“The electric street car came of age when the huge West End Street Railway of Boston electrified its entire system, and the Sage of the Breakfast Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes, commented, ‘There are crowds of people whirled through our streets on these new-fashioned cars, with their witch-broomsticks overhead – if they don’t come from Salem they ought to! – and not more than one in a dozen of these fish-eyed bipeds thinks or cares a nickel’s worth about the miracle which is wrought for their convenience.’

“Between then and now, upwards of two thousand varieties of tokens have been used on electric streetcars in this country and hundreds more in other countries. In the days when the streetcar was as familiar to city dwellers as the automobile today, the streetcar token was a common part of American currency. Streetcar tokens were readily accepted at face value by most businessmen, and during the depression years, when companies were near bankruptcy, employees were often paid in tokens instead of money. Such was the case in Beech Grove, Ind., when the Beech Grove Traction Corporation had to use tokens to compensate its employees.

Trolley cars were once very common, and tokens such as these were needed to ride.

“The first tokens used on trolley cars – the word ‘trolley’ deriving probably from the little 4-wheeled ‘troller’ used on early electric cars in Cincinnati; it rolled along twin electric wires above the car to gather the current – were similar to those which had been used on horsecars. They were made of hard rubber or celluloid, and often, they bore a picture of the same type of car pictured on horsecar tokens. Inasmuch as the car showed no horses and no trolley pole, it was adaptable for systems employing either horses or electricity. Soon thereafter, we find tokens made of the same material, but we were picturing a little 6-window open-platform car with a trolley pole.

“But other early electric streetcar lines made use of metal for their tokens, and often these, too, would picture a trolley car. One of the earliest of these was an aluminum token issued by the Lynchburg & Rivermont Street Railway (Virginia), which shows a car resembling a child's drawing more than anything else.

“The earliest electric cars were quite primitive by modern standards, modeled on the horsecars which they were replacing. It was necessary to have open platforms on horsecars to enable the driver to hold the reins and control his horses. It took electric streetcar companies several years before they realized that open platforms were no longer necessary now that streetcars utilized electricity instead of horses. And one has compassion for the thousands of streetcar drivers who stood out in the snow and cold while operating their trolley cars.

“At length, cars were made with closed platforms, and the motorman was able to sit inside with the passengers.

“Open cars were still used during the summer on many lines, and few things within the memory of present-day Americans were as delightful as a trip on a warm day to the beach while riding an open streetcar. The last of these cars were used in New Haven, Conn., by the Connecticut Company, to carry students to Yale University football games. They passed into oblivion when New Haven discarded its streetcars early in 1948.

“We find some of these open streetcars pictured on early aluminum fare tokens issued by the Sacramento Electric Gas & Railway Company. Because of the delightful climate there, California became noted for its open cars, and cars with at least some of their seats on the outside came to be known as ‘California-type’ cars.

“Prior to World War I, there was quite a bit of individualism displayed on the fare tokens used by various streetcar companies. Each token was distinctive, and if a car was pictured it was generally a close approximation of a car actually in use on the company’s system.

“Tokens were also somewhat larger in those days when the fare called for a large coin, the nickel. The Scoville Manufacturing Company of Waterbury, Conn., did offer its clients a stock type of token—always with identical obverse and reverse—and we find the same streetcar pictured on tokens issued by three different companies: Keokuk and Oskaloosa in Iowa and New Bedford in Massachusetts. The car is one of the earliest two-truck types and is shown in excellent detail on the tokens. They were all struck on 20mm white metal planchets, vintage about 1910.

“Another token manufacturing firm placed a picture of the same streetcar on tokens used by three different companies: Lewiston, Me., Rochester, N.Y., and Gettysburg, Pa. In this case, the car shown has the word ‘electric’ on its side and the number ‘206’ on its front. It has open platforms and a single 4-wheel truck.

“Sometimes the die work is beautifully conceived, and Very Fine examples of the token show people sitting in the cars. The streetcar pictured on tokens issued by the Fort Madison (Iowa) Street Railway is carrying a full load of people, and a lady is plainly visible sitting toward the rear, wearing a large, elegant hat!

“During and after World War I, tokens were issued in huge quantities by the transit firms in large cities when they installed new types of register fare boxes. These were the familiar small 16mm tokens with various letters hanging in the center – the letter being the only way a company could distinguish its own tokens from those of other firms because of their small size.

“Only a few varieties of these mass-produced tokens bothered to include pictures of streetcars. The only small 16mm tokens to picture streetcars were those of the Cincinnati Street Railway and the Public Service Coordinated Transport of Newark, N.J. In both cases, the car pictured is the large type used in the 1920s and – omen of things to come – both also picture a motor bus. Baltimore and Spokane also pictured a streetcar, but only on their school tokens for some reason, and the Queensboro Bridge Railway in New York used a handsome streetcar on its tokens.

“The late 1930’s saw the advent of the streamlined ‘PCC’ – for Presidents’ Conference Committee – streetcar. This car is pictured only on the white metal tokens for Pittsburgh Railways, which were first used in 1949. The Los Angeles Railway issued a beautiful commemorative token in bronze with a picture of the new type of streetcar. The token was issued to commemorate the arrival of the new cars, and it was accepted during ‘Transportation Week,” March 22-28, 1937, as fare on any of the company’s lines. But most of these tokens were saved as souvenirs, and few of them were actually used for fares.

“Today, when streetcars still operate in only a few cities, and only New Orleans uses the old-fashioned type of car, the streetcar token has become essentially an artifact of the past.

“We may hope, though, that somewhere in this great land of ours there will always be a streetcar to ride, and a token that’s good for a streetcar ride … and perhaps even in some remote corner a small boy who still wants to grow up to be a motorman.”