A look back at electric trolleys in their Frederick County heyday

May 08, 2023

Braddock Junction Station was along Maryland Avenue in front of today's Church of the Transfiguration in Braddock Heights.

If you’ve ever seen the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," you’re at least passingly familiar with the history of electric trolleys as the once-dominate form of urban transportation in the United States. You’re probably less familiar with the pivotal role electric railway systems played in the development of rural areas, especially Frederick and Washington counties.

"The Hagerstown and Frederick Railway, for the local area, was a great influence and a necessary part of growing our region into the communities we have today," said Reuben Moss, president of the Hagerstown and Frederick Railway Historical Society.

Although some electric trolley and light-rail systems are still in use in big cities, most people who live in suburbanized areas like Frederick County think of them as a defunct technology that couldn't keep up with new road-paving technologies and the automobile.

But when the first company in Frederick County opened an electric rail line connecting Middletown and Frederick in 1896, trolleys were part of a new futuristic technology that surpassed an older system of roads designed for horses and carts.

Tiffany Ahalt, vice president of the National Road Foundation, said the old National Road that connected Frederick, Middletown, Boonsboro and Hagerstown had been "one of the better roads" of the early 19th century because of a new paving technique called macadamizing that was developed in 1823. The road surface was maintained by private toll companies that were slowly driven out of business by losing long-distance freight customers to the B&O railroad starting in the 1830s.

By the end of the Civil War, road conditions were drastically deteriorated without the toll companies, leaving local business owners and farmers to make patch-work repairs on their own. Middletown farmers were frustrated by how long it took them to get their produce to market in Frederick, Moss said. During bad weather conditions, they may not have been able to reach their markets before their goods were spoiled.

When the first trolley company, led by a Frederick entrepreneur and funded by Middletown investors, opened service between the two communities, it was a technological marvel. A journey that had taken fully loaded horse-drawn wagons between five and eight hours to complete was reduced to a half hour via electric freight car, Moss said. Passengers could also now zip back and forth between the two towns.

But life-changing transportation speeds were only part of the story. The trolley line introduced an underlying technology that would completely transform rural America: electricity.

Moss said that while many communities in the Midwest didn't get electricity until the 1940s, the trolley system brought basic electric service to rural areas in Frederick and Washington counties in the 1890s. This allowed farms to use not only electric lighting, but electric motors for agricultural equipment. "They had a substation every two miles, and that made it convenient to wire up people's houses and businesses along the line," Moss said.

Not only were these rural areas provided with electricity by the trolley company but eventually, that company provided them with all sorts of household goods that ran on electricity.

"They were one of the first companies to offer appliance sales, where they would deliver the appliance to you," Moss said. "You could go to their appliance store in Hagerstown or Frederick, be shown the new appliances, get it delivered by trolley, then use the power the trolley company was generating to run it. It was all one big business. It was a big deal."

By 1904, the trolley reduced the typical travel time from Frederick to Hagerstown from about two days to two hours. By 1913, all of the local trolley companies had merged into the Hagerstown and Frederick Railway to form a network of nearly 90 miles of rail lines that provided both transportation and electricity to a wide swath of previously isolated rural communities.

By 1923, the unified system served Mount Airy and New Windsor in the east; Frostburg in the west; Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in the north; and Front Royal, Virginia, in the south.

"For a rural system that mainly served farm communities, it was among the largest of its type in the whole country," Moss said.

But the height of the trolley system's transportation supremacy was short-lived. In the 1920s, the old road networks that the electric railways had supplanted started to retake their former position, thanks largely to a renewed national interest in improving pavement technology spurred by bicycles and automobiles.

Ahalt said that by 1920, the old National Road, much of which is what today we call Alt. Route 40, had been repaved into good condition by state maintenance. The two-hour trolley trip from Frederick to Hagerstown was surpassed by 90-minute private automobile trips, Moss said. The last trolley ride from Frederick to Hagerstown ran on Oct. 8, 1938.

The trolley services continued within individual towns for much longer, surviving somewhat on their nostalgic appeal, Moss said.

"While most of those rural systems closed down in the teens and ’20s, and big cities upgraded to more streamlined modern trolleys in the ’30s and ’40s, this trolley system bought their last brand-new trolley in 1921, and it sort of became a time capsule for electric railroad history," he said. "They were still running the same trolleys they had in the 1910s in the 1940s, and people were traveling from all over the country to ride the local trolleys to experience that days-of-old feeling."

Moss says he thinks the real death knell for the last trolleys in the City of Frederick came in 1947 when the city made most of the streets in the core downtown area one-way to traffic. That severely curtailed the existing trolley routes, limiting their usefulness. The last passenger trolley ride in the city ran on Feb. 20, 1954.

However, the company that had been running the trolleys under the name of the Hagerstown and Frederick Railway in 1923 changed the name of their parent company to a business that persists to this day: Potomac Edison. The transportation part of their business made way for new technologies, but that underlying electric technology still touches all of our homes each day.

There are two main places where visitors can experience the history of the old trolley system today. The Boonsboro Trolley Museum is located in the town's original trolley station at 214 Main St., Boonsboro, and open to public from 2 to 5 p.m. on the fourth Sunday of each month from May through October. The Myersville Community Library has one of the old trolley cars. It is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday.

Erik Anderson is a freelance writer in Frederick who cares about few things more than the history of his community. Email him at [email protected].

Awesome article FNP. I love these historical columns about Frederick history. It's funny that in the picture, there are pretty much no trees around where the picture was taken. Back then a ton of clear cutting went on to harvest wood. Now Braddock is completely enveloped with beautiful trees! We cycle up there a lot on Maryland Ave and Jefferson Blvd because it's so beautiful and the old vacation homes so nostalgic. Hopefully the county will get the rail-trail from Frederick to Emmittsburg done where the old trolley used to run!! It would be a boon to the county in multiple ways. Thanks for the excellent article.

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