Imagine being in a rural field or small town 20 miles or so from the city of Pittsburgh.

In the distance you hear the rumble of grinding steel, the sound of an industrial era gone by, followed by the ringing of a bell that fills you with anticipation.

Their dinging bells and the sparks that sometimes flew.

I love the way it sounded.

I like the way it clacked.

The sound that the wheels made on this steel rail.

And then you see it.

A brightly colored trolley car ambling down a track.

Today your life is about to change.

The wind is blowing in off the Youghiogheny River.

And here comes the streetcar.

And I knew it would be warm and cozy inside.

You'll make friends on that trolley.

You might meet your future husband or wife.

For sure, you will be transported from that empty field to the big city.

The trolley was always the way to get to something special, but it was special in itself.

To a world of lights and ideas, live theater and movies and food you've never tasted before.

It connects you to everything a pirates game, a romance coming home from work or going off to war.

The trolley transformed a region and its people.

Many of today's thriving communities owe there exists to the trolley.

And the trolley transported an industrial city into the modern age with each stop until its final ride.

It's a revolution, a transportation revolution.

I loved the trolley, I love them I still love trolleys.

You just go catch that trolley and ride.

In Pittsburgh, the trolleys or streetcars got their start in 1859, when they were pulled by horses and went very, very slow.

In those days, well, I guess the best way to say it is, to paraphrase Orson Welles from the movie The Magnificent Ambersons.

“The only public conveyance was the streetcar.

A lady could call to it from an upstairs window, and the car would wait until she came forth from the house.” But it was a beginning, the beginning of something that turned smaller towns into bigger hubs.

In those early days of the mid-19th century, most people worked and lived in the same area, same neighborhood.

You had to live close to your work because you walk to work.

The trolley was what enabled people to live more than walking distance from their job.

That means the town, the suburbs.

That's what grew the suburbs, the private homes and so on.

And it just seemed like the way to go.

You didn't have to walk through muddy streets.

You didn't have to saddle your horse or or get a ride from someone else.

So it became public transportation, truly public transportation.

But by the turn of the century, around 1900, electric streetcars replaced horse drawn cars, and things really speeded up.

Boy, electricity was big.

And of course, Westinghouse right here in Pittsburgh with its electrical motors that could drive wheels.

That was a huge invention.

Once electricity was readily available with these power stations and trolleys.

Trolley is that springy rod on top of the the streetcar that touches an electric wire.

Those things were everywhere now, and it was the utility companies that really pushed the streetcar business because they already had the rights of way, and they had the utility poles that could then power the trolley cars.

The horse cars had help to some degree, but they weren't all that much faster than walking.

The trolley doubled and tripled the speed, and probably the biggest jumping speed, more so than jets replacing propeller planes, really.

And as the trolley sped up, so did Pittsburgh's population growth.

60,000 people in 1859 1860, right before the Civil War.

By 1920, they were nearly 600,000 people in Pittsburgh, tenfold increase, and whole neighborhoods grew up as a result of the trolley lines.

They followed where the trolley would bring people.

As trolley lines expanded as they were electrified, people could go farther out, and the 90 neighborhoods of Pittsburgh were connected by trolley.

The trolley was reaching its heyday in Pittsburgh, complementing the beauty of the city.

The predominant streetcar operator in western Pennsylvania was the Pittsburgh Railways Company.

At its peak in 1918, it operated 99 trolley routes, using 2000 trolley cars running over 600 miles of track.

In 1925, there were over 370 million riders counted that year.

You're looking out the front window of the Ardmore Trolley on your way to Forest Hills.

There's a slow rhythm to the trolley as it rocks back and forth.

But don't let that fool you because the trolleys were picking up speed, propulsion and control equipment had made possible the expansion of city streetcar systems.

Pittsburgh's suburbs were now being connected via trolley lines, including Latrobe, home to future children's television star Fred Rogers.

But those were the days when there were very few cars in Latrobe.

But there was what they called the Toonerville Trolley, which was sort of a train that went through Latrobe and went out to Ligonier, it went out to Idlewild, and we used to go on that for the school picnics.

Is that where you got your idea of a trolley?

And based on that?

It may have been.

It may have been.

I just love trolleys.

When Fred was creating the program, he was thinking exactly of the neighborhood.

And, you know, the bakery, the the music shop, creating a neighborhood.

And and the trolley was the means of getting, getting around the neighborhood.

It is that connection.

And that's what trolleys did here in a in a larger area of Pittsburgh connected Pittsburghers.

Once trolleys became more available than average, people could come to the city center to shop and to socialize.

Your life revolved around the streetcar.

Pittsburgh's a classic example of that.

You took the streetcar to work.

You took the streetcar to school, to the movies, to go shopping.

Everywhere we traveled, it was either by trolley or by train.

Would catch a trolley, go downtown, would end up either going to the zoo or the museum.

We would do a lot of shopping in downtown Pittsburgh.

And the way to go would be either by train or by trolley.

I only use the trolley when we were going somewhere special, when we were going to take the trolley, to go down to Forbes Field to watch the Pirates play, or when we were going to downtown Pittsburgh.

My grandfather would take me to see a movie or a play Downtown Pittsburgh.

People were going somewhere and it was in.

They dressed up because they were going to downtown Pittsburgh.

You would you would dress up.

I wore my fanciest dresses.

I wore my patent leather shoes.

We always wore white gloves.

It was a big deal to go to downtown Pittsburgh.

We didn't go to downtown very often, and we would go downtown, and my mother and I would go downtown shopping.

We would go into Kaufmann's and then come back and go to McCrory's and have lunch.

And that was a special treat.

And just as trolleys were bringing people to commerce, the placement of advertisements on the trolleys were bringing commerce to the people and the ads on the trolley cars were a feast for the eyes.

Some of the ads slots had this week visit the Ice Capades at the New Kent Gardens.

They'd have starring so-and-so and so on.

And so the Heinz ads were particularly eye catching.

After all, the home of the 57 was a clean spot in Pittsburgh, a city where at the time you could go blind as a bat from the smog, as the saying goes.

Nothing like a delicious can of cooked spaghetti, I always say, and it's nice to know you're buying ketchup that contains no benzoate of soda.

And what about Heinz Pure cider vinegar?

Those apples look like they've just been pulled off the tree.

And it's interesting too.

I so wonder why they're up so high.

But, you know, when people stand in a trolley, if the seats are all gone, you're at ad level.

You can.

You can just read all of the ads.

In the early days of the trolley in western Pennsylvania, many folks lived in neighborhoods where the people were just like them Italian, American neighborhoods, Irish, Polish, African American neighborhoods.

Once you were on the trolley, you were with people who were like you, but also people who were different from you.

And that inspired a term for the trolleys - rolling melting pots.

Well, look at Pittsburgh and you look at all the different ethnic neighborhoods that there are.

And there were.

Well, guess what?

The trolley car, the streetcar, as we call them in Pittsburgh, it connected all those neighborhoods.

You had rich people, you had poor people, you had middle class.

They were all riding together on the same car.

So that's why we call them rolling melting pots.

I think there's a significant social impact that this transportation revolution had.

These regular passengers that I knew who they were.

I knew where they were getting off.

The one lady would bring me a cup of coffee every morning.

You know, you got to know who these people were.

Everybody was nice.

Everybody was polite.

It was just a it was a lovely experience seeing lots of nice people saying hello to one another.

And we knew the neighbors and it was a different time.

It's not like now.

You knew the people on your street.

You knew the people from 2 or 3 streets over.

Nobody was ever angry or upset or or talked down to anybody.

It was like family.

Mainly, it was just having a good time, you know, because it was high school and junior high school.

So you're laughing and talking with your friends.

Streetcars opened social opportunities for Pittsburghers.

They could meet friends, go on dates.

I think there was something romantic about it.

And that trolley ride was sort of magical.

I was used to a bus and I couldn't wait to get onto the trolley.

All of that was very.

It was very romantic.

I suppose that perhaps some love affairs began on trolleys.

There was.

There was romance on the on the trolley.

I didn't find romance on the trolley, but a lot of times you you saw romance on the trolley.

Because we sat in the back, that's where the people that were interested in romance would sit also.

And you'd see boys and girls kissing in the back on their way home from school or holding hands.

And if your friend didn't get on the trolley with you.

You'd always get that quick kiss goodbye.

I'll see you tomorrow.

You know I'll see you tomorrow.

Until there were no more tomorrows.

Trolleys and the people who rode them were like a dream that evolved out of different real life episodes where a diverse group of people congregated, sort of like in a church, because they all wanted the same thing and they were all getting there together.

Unfortunately, the trolleys heyday was relatively short.

More and more people started to get automobiles, and private transportation became a thing.

The neighborhoods were much further out and trolleys really couldn't support them.

The tracks didn't go that far.

The electric lines often didn't go that far.

So these remote suburbs really grew up after World War two, with the bus culture that followed.

On January 28th, 1967, the so-called Last Chance Trolley pulled out of Wilkinsburg with a sign that marked the end of an era.

And they had a big celebration of that.

It was a snowy January day, and then they had the last chance trolley riding through Wilkinsburg.

As one observer recalled, there was some sleet and it became very slippery.

The bus replacements were sliding around, while the streetcars had no problems.

The trolleys did continue in some form.

The last official trolley ran in the streets of the Golden Triangle on July 7th, 1985, and while today's light rail systems that evolved from the first generation streetcar era can still be seen traversing the city today.

These are some of the last pictures of the trolleys, the way we remember them.

In some way, I hope we could bring that back, because the trolleys were such an integral part of that whole lifestyle.

It was fun.

It was fun to go down town.

I was saddened when they when they closed down the trolleys, when they said that was the end of trolley service because I thought, that's that's a neat thing.

And not just how are people going to get around, but I just thought the trolley is a neat experience.

What are these young people going to experience?

If there had not been trolleys in Latrobe when Fred was growing up, I wonder if there would have been a trolley on Mr.

Rogers Neighborhood.

I don't know if it had been a bus.

Maybe it would have been a bus, I don't know, but the trolley is so much more romantic, don't you think, than a bus?

Well, much has been written and said about the era of trolleys.

One thing remains certain trolleys and our memories of them still inspire a sense of wonderment.

Perhaps Blanche DuBois said it best in A Streetcar Named Desire.

“I don't want realism.

I want magic!” Would you give us your rendition of Ding Ding Ding Went the trolley?

Oh, I might be fun to have on tape.

Well, ding ding ding went the trolley.

Clang, clang, clang with the bell.

Xinxing zing went my heartstrings.

From the moment I saw him, I fell.

I think that's it, right?

He tipped his hat.

He took a seat.

Right.

He said he hoped he hadn't stepped upon my feet.

Right?

Da da dee, da da da da.

That's it.