The Case:
A Cleveland man with a passion for trains has long wondered about an electric street car in his city’s transit museum.
He is curious to learn what happened to the city’s once extensive and highly praised electric trolley car network.
Streetcars were once the most popular form of urban transportation in the country, by World War I, most cities of more than 10,000 people had an electric railway system. But by the 1950s, this form of transportation had all but disappeared.
History Detectives hits the road to Washington, D.C. and Cleveland to track the evolution of urban mass transit systems and investigate the fate of downtown areas and the rise of suburban sprawl.
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