Right now, the city is undergoing a long, long project to rehab the streetcar tracks on O and P Streets. They will pull up all the cobblestones (well, technically they’re Belgian blocks, but everyone just calls them cobblestones) and pull up the tracks and the yolks that support them. They will then reposition the yolks lower to be better aligned with the street grade, which has eroded a lot over the years. Then they will reposition the cobblestones and, hopefully, the streets will look beautiful and be a lot more safe to ride on.
But what won’t be riding on the tracks is streetcars themselves. The whole point of this exercise is to preserve in place the last remaining examples of Washington’s rare conduit power system. That’s a fancy way of saying the streetcars got their power from a buried power line. The streetcars accessed the powered line through a slot running down the center of the tracks. It looked a lot like a cable car slot, and for good reason because a lot of the streetcars in Washington were originally cable cars that were transitioned over to electric power. Continue reading
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
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