CTA Tattler

The November caption is partially wrong.
Once converted to electricity, the bus couldn't have run on Diversey which was originally a Motor Coach Co. route & had no trolley wires.

Oh for cryin' out loud.....

How about:

"Cool, thanks!"

I print this out every year for my calendar at work. The only complaint (since there apparently has to be a complaint attached with every message, or it's not allowed) is that it always comes out at least a week or two into January. I don't think the number of days in a month changes most of the time, so why is it never ready on time?

Sorry, Unindicted, Lind's Chicago Surface Lines, An Illustrated History doesn't agree with you.

Diversey Blvd. was a CMC route. However, Diversey Ave. west of Western was a trolley bus route run by CSL, later CTA. Eventually the CTA merged CMC 34 with CSL 76 to form the present route.

Lind has a long discussion about it, including the associated legal wrangling, in his Competition and Cooperation chapter.

Why does the skokie swift (september) appear to have both overhead wires, and a third rail??

The wires are on the Com Ed pole at the side of the tracks, not over them.

The Skokie Swift was switching to third rail powering and had both installed while the overhead was being removed last summer. I'm not sure on the time frame though.

Somehow UCC will never admit he was wrong, or thank the CTA for the calendar...

It's good to know some things never change.

"The Skokie Swift was switching to third rail powering and had both installed while the overhead was being removed last summer. I'm not sure on the time frame though."

Not at Ridge Ave., and not at the time the 5000s (50s) were running there.

Wow, 111th and Michigan Avenue looks so different from that picture. Incredible.

I didn't know we had propane powered buses at any point. Why did we cease using them? Anyone have more info about these?

Did we use the Queen Mary as a pilot program? Why did we only have 1?

When the diesel engine came of age, it made perfect economic sense to buy buses with diesel engines instead of propane. The buses were less expensive; the fuel was less expensive; the engines more reliable.

If I remember correctly, the Queen Mary was a demo that CSL got to keep. IIRC, the concept of an articulated electric bus didn't work out as well in practice as it did in concept, and it wasn't until the 1980's that a practical articulated electric trolley bus came out -- long after Chicago stoped using trolley buses.

In this day and age, the idea of powering buses with something other than fossil fuel seems so imparitive, and the abandonment of those alternative power souces in the past looks bad. But the bottom line is that keeping less efficient, more costly power sources would have been a mistake. Today's alternative power source vehicles have little in common with those of the mid-20th century.

Is your 2009 calendar for sale also? i do not beleie the download is as good as the original?

"I don't think the number of days in a month changes most of the time, so why is it never ready on time?"

Or, they could have just tacked a January, 2010 onto this calendar and it WOULD be on time for next year.

But, Chicago had Red Rockets? I thought those were only in Toronto.

And that No. 36 bus in the October photo? It just passed me by on State Street. The driver said he was going to be express because he was delayed.

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/jstreet/396470/shovel_ready_mass_transit

Cool interview with a random CTA insider about funding and such

There isn't a single non-White face in that entire calendar.

The Cushman collection at Indiana U. has many shots of Chicago from the 40s and 50s. Here's a pic showing the Water Tower and a double-decker bus!

http://preview.tinyurl.com/8l3v54

There are some real idiots on that Nation website posting, but the article was decent enough. You would have though people on there would be a little more informed.

Unfortunately, there are some people who see the words transit and funding and become completely immune to logic or any meaningful discussion on the topic. All public transit is just a socialist plot to take money away from those go-getters who are self-sufficient and give it to lazy leeches who refuse to provide for themselves. No one who subscribes to this theory will ever see that transit serves the good of all to some degree whether or not that person chooses to use it. When I visit my sisters in the suburbs through time-consuming and circuitous train/bus combinations, their neighbors look at me as though I have three heads when I tell them I've sold my car and willingly rely on transit.