Accidents and Delays
The trolleys to the SW cemeteries didn’t always run smoothly. There were accidents and mishaps that at the very least delayed service, but were sometimes serious enough to be reported in local newspapers. The Metropolitan’s F Line had a particularly serious accident in its second year of operation, with eleven of thirteen passengers injured, two severely. On Oct. 16, 1891, as detailed in the Morning Oregonian, an open trolley was traveling “at the rate of twenty miles an hour” on a downgrade, then started “careening wildly” as it approached a curved trestle somewhere between 2nd Avenue and Fulton Park. The trolley jumped the track and ran along the pedestrian walk before crashing through the guard rail and plunging thirty feet into a ravine. Because it was an open trolley, many passengers were able to jump out before the plunge, but others apparently were carried down with the car. There were no known fatalities, despite the paper’s rather graphic descriptions of some of the injuries. Passengers and at least one reader indicated that the motorman was driving too fast and recklessly, already a frequent complaint along the new hilly route.
Decades later, a more humorous incident unfolded on the N-S Line to Fulton. In the 1930s, near the end of that line’s history, the brakes on an empty trolley car “let go” during a motorman’s break at Corbett and Bancroft. As reported by Richard Thompson in Portland’s Streetcar Lines, the trolley rolled downhill on Corbett and up the slight grade to Nebraska, rounding that corner and rolling down to Virginia, where it crashed into Porcelli’s grocery. Fortunately there were no passengers aboard, and no bystanders were hurt.
In addition to runaway streetcars, the lines cutting through the hills south of Portland-proper were plagued with landslides, iced-up wires, snowstorms, and floods. Then there was Portland’s customary cold and wet weather, which could make riding the open cars uncomfortable. Mechanical and logistical delays, as well as disagreements with conductors about tickets not being honored for transfers, resulted in some disgruntled passengers through the years.
