http://www.charlotteobserver.com/breaki ... 56816.html
As Charlotte plans to build a streetcar line on Trade Street, a small construction project in Dilworth is a reminder of the city’s on-again, off-again relationship with trolleys.

The city has dug up part of East Boulevard to build medians in the center lanes, making it friendlier for pedestrians and bikers. In doing so, the contractor has unearthed hundreds of feet of decades-old streetcar rails.

The twisted pieces of steel - caked in concrete - have been piled on East Boulevard, a reminder that what’s old is new again.

Nice little bit of PR. The reality is that in many cities, there's LOTS of trolley rail buried under the streets, and in many of these cities (Baltimore being one example), deferred maintenance of the streets means that the rails all too often evidence themselves via cracks or poking their way up.

The Baltimore Streetcar Museum used to get lots of intact girder rails from Baltimore's street repairs, and still does now and then, but as of late the reality is that after so many years buried under asphalt, the rails are typically badly embrittled, and don't survive removal in one piece.

I'm a little embarrassed about the short attention span of the media in my town - but this gets covered on an occasional basis, always as if it is something new.

Looking back into the mid 1960's, I think, Steve McGuire's column in Railroad Magazine had a photo of two rails hanging over a trench dug in the median of The Plaza, a main street in the Plaza Midwood streetcar suburb in Charlotte. The rail sections were cut out and salvaged by a local doctor if memory serves. No idea how much is still there, undisturbed under the sod. Very likely more is in the median of Queens Road in Myers Park, and in various other places around Dilworth and Elizabeth.

Back in probably about 1990, when I was restoring Charlotte car 85 downtown, living just a little further east out Central Avenue than the plaza Midwood neighborhood, I came across a repaving project on Central Avenue that was digging up the old streetcar tracks and paving bricks around Hawthorne Lane. I called the city engineer and requested the tracks be retained in place - he refused. It was all removed by ripping out with a backhoe, but we did salvage a short section and one part of a switch. The ties looked like new.

Guess where the new trolley line is slated to be laid..........and what it will cost compared to just not having removed it in the first place. Of course, the idea of incompatability could have been solved by simply choosing cars that are appropriate to historic neighborhoods instead of the space age stuff recommended by consultants paid to do so. Works fine on the McKinney line in Dallas, and in other cities as well.

Looks like the media isn't the only local institution with a short attention span.

dave

There's lots of it buried here in St. Louis. I literally tripped over some the other day on the old Cherokee car line, abandoned in the 1930s.

Over by Saint Louis University, on Olive Street, there is a long section of one exposed rail that dates to the last streetcar service in the 1960s.

Same goes for Signal Mountain, Tennessee, There's a two or three block section of James Boulevard near the old Signal Mountain Inn that hasn't been resurfaced since 1934 where the tracks are still exposed. At that same location is one of the original passenger shelters-made out of local stone.