Holyoke Street Railway

The Holyoke Street Railway (HSR) was an interurban streetcar and bus system operating in Holyoke, Massachusetts as well as surrounding communities with connections in Amherst, Belchertown, Chicopee, Easthampton, Granby, Northampton, Pelham, South Hadley, Sunderland, Westfield, and West Springfield. Throughout its history the railway system shaped the cultural institutions of Mount Tom, being operator of the mountain's famous summit houses, one of which hosted President McKinley, the Mount Tom Railroad, and the trolley park at the opposite end of this funicular line, Mountain Park.

In the history of American railroad engineering, the system was the first in the United States to make use of exothermic welding, better known as thermite welding, to lay track for regular use. Railway engineer George E. Pellissier would not only be the first in the country to implement this now-standard operating procedure, but would further develop Hans Goldschmidt's welding process for the street railway, subsequently serving as an engineer and superintendent for the inventor's Goldschmidt Thermite Company before returning to Holyoke as an assistant general manager.

Operated by the Holyoke Street Railway Company, abbreviated on livery as the Hly. St. Ry. Co., the streetcar system began operation on September 24, 1884, consolidated with the Amherst and Sunderland Street Railway in 1907, and ceased operations as a streetcar operator in 1937. Regular bus operations began in 1921, and soon after the incorporation of the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority in 1977, the company began serving as a contract operator. This service continued until 1987, when a dispute between labor and management led regular bus service to an abrupt end, with would-be passengers still waiting at stops, on July 1, 1987. After four years of inactivity and with a municipal school bus contract failing to pass negotiations, the company liquidated its assets and had dissolved by 1991.

Today their former headquarters serves as the main facilities of the Holyoke Department of Public Works, now known as the Pellisier Building, for the family which owned and managed the system in its final decades. A second car barn of the Amherst and Sunderland Street Railway division functions as facilities for the town of Amherst's own Department of Public Works.

Rail

Founding and early years

The Holyoke Street Railway Company held its first meeting on February 12, 1884, with a charter granted by the Office of Secretary of the Commonwealth Henry B. Pierce on June 11, 1884. According to the company's articles of association, it began with capital of $25,000 (≈$692,000 in 2017 USD) with 250 shares of $100 each issued, and was authorized to operate as a horsecar rail system in South Hadley and Holyoke. The company's first president was William A. Chase, and its first board of directors included two members who would later become mayors of Holyoke, Franklin P. Goodall and George H. Smith.

The system rapidly expanded its service capacity; in 1884, the system had 2 cars and 5 horses operating a line between Main Street in Holyoke and South Hadley Falls, by 1886 this had expanded to 3 other routes in Holyoke and the livery totaled at 15 cars and 56 horses. At the time it was commonplace for patrons to keep lumps or cubes of sugar in their pockets for often ornery horses. In its earliest years it met some resistance from Hampshire County commissioners and South Hadley selectmen, threatening to withdraw from South Hadley Falls in 1886 due to policies related to taxation and maintenance of roads and a former bridge connecting Holyoke across the Connecticut River. The following year, it was proposed the company stop every other car on the South Hadley route on the Holyoke side of where the Vietnam Memorial Bridge stands today, to halve taxes paid for use of the bridge there at that time. Public opinion on the South Hadley side of the river remained largely in favor of the company, however one writer for The Republican compared the ordeal to "child's play" due to lack of compromise by either. Some consensus was eventually reached during the construction of the bridge's successor, the Hadley-Holyoke Bridge by engineer Edward S. Shaw, as the railway company's lawyer would work with Hampshire and Hampden county commissioners to negotiate the bridge's width and location of the railway tracks.

In 1887, William S. Loomis, a former partner in the ''Holyoke Transcript-Telegram'', approached the railway's board of directors proposing that their line from City Hall and Maple Street be extended further into Elmwood. Loomis had previously purchased a large tract of land there which he planned to develop into a streetcar suburb. His calls for expansion were rejected however by the railway company, but ultimately working with connections from his time as a newspaper magnate, he would buy a controlling share in the company. Upon purchasing this stock, Loomis began working on the laying out of additional tracks along with roads on his own land, the former Horace Brown Farm which would become the blocks around modern-day Elmwood Avenue, as well as Laurel Street/Brown Avenue across Northampton Street. By 1889 the railwork had been completed to Elmwood, and in 1890 to the Highlands. During his time with the railway Loomis would serve as treasurer as well as general manager of the company, and is generally credited as a key figure in the expansion of the railway system to the two other neighborhoods, Oakdale and Springdale.

Electrification and expansion

The railway's first electric car ran on the South Hadley Falls line at about 2pm on August 8, 1891, and by the end of that year all routes had been electrified. The very first run however proved to not be a resounding success as aside from Loomis and the board of directors, no passengers climbed aboard on the maiden run of an electric car; it was not until the return trip back over the bridge from South Hadley that one Jesse L. Bliss became the new system's first passenger. Bliss himself would go on to try to become a driver of the cars, however reportedly jumped one of the trolleys off the tracks on his own first run.

The electrification of old horse trams came within less than a decade for the Holyoke Street Railway and in Massachusetts as a whole. When the railway's first electric cars appeared in 1891, at the time about a third of all street railway lines in Massachusetts had electric overhead systems. However by the turn of the century not only were these cars commonplace in the Holyoke system, they comprised more than 99% of such streetcar lines in the Commonwealth.

Another feature that typified railways in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was trolley parks; in the years immediately after the electrification of the system, Loomis purchased a large lot on the southeastern side of Mount Tom and in 1894 purchased a post-and-beam stage for performers there. In 1895 the railway was extended to this site, and by 1897 the area was officially chartered at Mountain Park.

In his 1908 report to Mayor Nathan P. Avery, landscape architect and planner Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. urged the city to work to more closely align its planning with the development of the street railway in a working relationship, saying a liaison or authority ought to be established in determining future extensions and improvements in the electric railway lines operating in the city, stressing it would yield some of the most economical growth of housing capacity in tandem with the grid system. By 1920, prior to the first bus routes, the railway had a reported 71.5 miles of track and 18,000,000 fares in that same year.

Pioneering thermite rail welding

As a transportation system, the railway also held at least one unprecedented piece of technology prior to its numerous competitors in the early 20th century- thermite welding. During the 1890s in Germany, Hans Goldschmidt developed the modern process for exothermic welding for railways. This process, now an international standard in railway construction, was first used commercially in tram lines in Essen, Germany in 1899. Over the next several years other cities including Leeds and Singapore would adopt this construction method, and in 1904 its inventor would open the Goldschmidt Thermit Company offices in New York City. While development of this process continued, an engineering student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, George E. Pellissier,Stephan Kallee
George E. Pellissier. The first American to use Thermite welding commercially.
Published on 1 December 2018. Retrieved on 1 December 2018. followed Goldschmidt's work closely and approached the Holyoke Street Railway proposing that they use the new thermite process for their own lines. Soon after the railway ordered 160 joints to be placed on an approximately -long tract of rail on Main Street, and on August 8, 1904 Holyoke became the first rail line in the United States to lay track with the process. That same year Hartford would join the ranks as the second in country.

While Hartford would be met with some issues due to what was later described as a rushed installation, the Holyoke installation served as a proof-of-concept for the advantages of the method. With thermite welding, a small crew of unskilled laborers with no prior knowledge of welding or specialty metalwork could be sent out with a crucible, pre-made molds, and a set amount of thermite. For railway companies the new technique would lead to a more reliable and inexpensive method of laying down new tracks that would make future system expansion more practical than bolted or welded separate joint techniques used up to that time.

This represented the beginning of Pellissier's career with the railway company, as he would obtain a full-time engineer position upon graduation and went on to present his work to the American Street and Interurban Railway Association in 1905. The Holyoke engineer would not only serve as merely Goldschmidt's first American customer, but rather Pellissier would go on to work for the inventor's American company in New York, designing their Jersey City

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