After writing about the lost tram tracks below the asphalt at Heliotrope and Rosewood, I looked up an old out-of-print pamphlet a friend of mine.... After writing about the lost tram tracks below the asphalt at Heliotrope and Rosewood, I looked up an old out-of-print pamphlet a friend of mine had found and given to me for my birthday a few years ago: a history of the Los Angeles Railway!

This included a map, which I've taken the liberty of scanning and saving as a PDF file; click on the image at left to see a map of both tram and bus routes in Los Angeles in 1932, before its ultimate expansions of later decades and well before its assisted suicide in the 1950s.

It confirms that there was indeed tram service past that insignificant crossing in East Hollywood--and many other places as well. Indeed, the map appears not to show the entire extent of the system. Perhaps the version in the pamphlet (which came out in the '70s, written by S. E. Easlon) was itself copied from an incomplete remnant.

An incomplete remnant of a transit system is what we have now, smothered under the chaos of Carmageddon. Well, a few more decades, a few more billion, and we'll have caught up to our advances of three-quarters of a century past, and then can start moving forward again.

It's not what we lost that's galling, but what we threw away!