Burlingame’s battery-powered streetcar

According to the website “Peninsula Royalty: The Founding Families of Burlingame-Hillsborough,” an example of the impact the automobile had on lot sales came from the neighborhood west of El Camino Real to Vancouver Avenue between Hillside and Adeline drives, an area that had 240 lots. Between 1907 and 1920, 37 lots sold. Between 1920 and 1930, 154 lots (or four times as many) sold.

One of the best accounts of Mr. Easton’s venture was penned by Barbara Lash Evans in “Burlingame Lively Memories,” published in 1977 by the Burlingame Historical Society.

“There was no local public transportation, so it helped if those who didn’t have a horse and carriage really enjoyed walking,” Evans wrote. In hopes of luring customers, real estate brochures for Easton Addition No. 7 touted the Burlingame Electric Railway line. According to Evans, the line proved popular, at least on Sundays with sunny skies, but just how many of the passengers bought tracts is anybody’s guess. On such sunny days “the little yellow car was filled with passengers carrying baskets of fried chicken, jugs of lemonade and other good things to eat for picnics on the grassy slopes above Hillsdale Circle. At the end of the afternoon, tired-but-happy picnickers waited at the brick work on Hillside Circle for the railway car that would take them back to the flatlands.”

There was only one car and it required a crew of just one. The car had dual controls at each end, allowing the operator to go from one end to the other at the final stop and run the car from duplicate controls. The car was about 28 feet and had four 10- horsepower motors and 119 Edison Improved Storage Batteries that required seven hours of charging at night, plus a nearly four-hour boost during the day. The batteries were charged from an electric cable from a powerhouse. Dubbed the Burlingame Railway, the line connected with the Southern Pacific Railroad and the No. 40 streetcar that ran from San Francisco to San Mateo. It ran every half hour when the batteries weren’t being charged.

“The little railway car could whiz along at 23-miles-per hour on level ground but slowed to five-miles-per hour up the maximum grade,” Evans reported. The tracks ran from a station near present day Broadway west on Carmelita to Cabrillo, north on Cabrillo to Hillside and then west up Hillside to Alvarado Avenue.

The car was severely underpowered for the climb up the hill. According to the Peninsula Royalty website, the car was built to carry up to 26 passengers, but rarely did because lots were slow to sell. The only railway worker, a man named D. N. Fisk, often found himself riding up and down the line alone.

Finally, after running the trolley at a financial loss for five years or so, Easton applied to the city for permission to abandon the line. Permission was granted, providing he replace the trolley with a 15-passenger Studebaker bus, which he did. The Easton Addition lots sold briskly once the automobile became popular and affordable in the 1920s.

The Rear View Mirror by history columnist Jim Clifford appears in the Daily Journal every other Monday. Objects in The Mirror are closer than they appear.