from Street Railway Journal , circa 1895 |
This isn't your basic track of two rails and wooden crossties. The
track structure extends some two and a half feet into the earth.
Under the paving blocks are cast iron yokes 5 feet apart, the
trapezoidal shape shown here and in the previous line drawing. The
yoke holds the shape of the lengthwise pieces, keeping the rails the
right distance apart and keeping the conduit open.
The diagram above shows a double-track cable installation, but the
basics are the same on Broadway. There is a yoke every 5 feet, and a
pair of insulator covers around the conduit every 15 feet, and a
cleaning manhole cover every 105 feet, of which every fourth one (420
feet apart) was also a slightly larger feeder manhole. It's a lot of
cast iron and concrete. And you wondered why they didn't lift the
tracks?
But in some places they did lift this track. Look at the similar
pavement work in Amsterdam Avenue (110th to 112th Streets), which had
conduit cars, and you may have looked farther downtown this past year
in Columbus Avenue, which was a cable line converted to conduit, and
you don't see any track. On those lines, streetcars were discontinued
about 1935. The Broadway cars ran until after the war, and by then no
one wanted the scrap iron, or at least not enough to pay for mining
this difficult ore.
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