Today, the quiet, wooded path in the Grandview/Thorpe neighborhood offers few clues to travelers of its bustling past, the former artery of Spokane’s transit seemingly going unnoticed against the old growth. Yet, once upon a time, these very routes were a lifeline for a budding Lilac City, linking distant districts while carrying passengers to work, play, and everything in between for nearly fifty years. It was an era of clanging bells and crowded platforms, marked by stories of grand farewells, devastating disasters, and a network that once stretched across the Inland Northwest. These are the Spokane trolley trails.
The Interurban Trails: Escape to Cheney and Medical Lake
While Spokane’s initial trolley lines served urban neighborhoods, the most ambitious projects connected the city to surrounding communities. The interurban lines transformed regional travel, with the Spokane and Inland Empire Railroad creating a comprehensive network that reached Cheney, Medical Lake, and even Coeur d’Alene. These weren’t mere commuter lines but vital connectors that shaped regional development patterns.
At its peak from 1905 to 1922, eleven passenger trains ran daily. On busy holiday weekends, like that of the Fourth of July, they transported up to 4,000 passengers to Medical Lake, which was once the resort town of the region with plenty of places to play and stay. Prohibition would only heighten the allure of riding these rails. With Medical Lake and Cheney becoming “dry” towns in 1909 and 1910, the trolley route suddenly found itself doubling as a bootlegger’s express as passengers snuck booze from Spokane to its dry neighbors, earning the run its cheeky nickname, the “suitcase special.” The flat, wooded trail preserved today in the Grandview/Thorpe neighborhood represents just a fragment of these incredible journeys along this extensive system that once featured an impressive wooden trestle crossing Latah Valley.
Tragedy on the Tracks: The Division Street Disaster
For all their charm and convenience, trolley travel was not without its dangers. Accidents were common, especially as Model T Fords began to crowd the streets. As one veteran motorman noted, a car always came out worse in a collision with a 30-ton streetcar. However, the worst disaster in Spokane’s trolley history was a structural catastrophe.
Before dawn on December 18, 1915, two trolleys, the Astor Street car and the Hillyard car, crossed the Division Street Bridge over the frozen Spokane River. Without warning, the bridge deck collapsed violently, plunging the Astor Street car into the icy waters below. In the ensuing chaos, a steel girder came clashing down from overhead, severing the top off of the half-submerged car. Survivors recounted screams of agony as several passengers were killed instantly and others found themselves struggling to escape from the frigid waters.
The catastrophe claimed five lives and injured 12 others, with engineers later suspecting that flood debris had weakened the bridge’s structure. The second trolley, the Hillyard car, was left dangling precariously with its front wheels on land and rear wheels dragged downward. Thankfully, the conductor and the only two passengers managed to climb up the aisle using the seats as steps and crawl out the front to safety.
The Fading Tracks of a Lasting Legacy
The first significant blow to Spokane’s trolleys came not from the private automobile, but from an entrepreneurial loophole: the “jitney cab.” Beginning around 1915, auto dealers began renting out their cars to enterprising drivers who would cruise trolley lines and offer rides in the improvised taxies for the price of a trolley fare. After all, why wait for a fixed, one-way trolley line when a jitney could pick you up and take you directly to your destination?
Still, despite the jitney’s promise of door-to-door freedom, drivers routinely crammed anywhere from eight to ten passengers into each tiny cab, leaving their riders packed shoulder to shoulder. The trolley companies quickly fought to have the jitneys banned, proclaiming not just a concern for passenger safety, but also stating they were “an inducement to immorality,” as oftentimes women passengers would sit on men’s laps to make room.
Eventually, the jitneys were banned, but it was a hollow victory for the trolley companies as the public’s desire for flexible, on-demand transportation had already been unleashed. By 1920, middle-class families could afford their own automobiles, and trolley boardings began a steep descent. In 1922, Washington Water Power and Spokane Traction merged into Spokane United Railways in a last-ditch bid to shore up dwindling revenues. Yet over the next eleven years, ridership plunged by roughly 33 percent. Facing corroding rails and rising costs, the company followed countless others in 1933 by replacing trolleys with rubber-tired buses that needed no tracks or overhead wires and could flex their routes at will. Three years later, the final streetcar rolled away for scrap, sealing Spokane’s shift from steel rails to rubber tires.
The Last Ride: A Fiery Farewell to a Beloved Era
The end of Spokane’s trolley era was not a quiet retirement but a spectacular, fiery sendoff. On August 31, 1936, the city hosted a grand parade to mark the official transition to a bus system. Thousands of spectators, estimated at 10,000, lined the streets for the funeral procession of “faithful old car No. 202.” Bedecked with funeral crepe and accompanied by solemn-faced pallbearers, the trolley made its final journey from downtown to its longtime destination, Natatorium Park.
The mood was a strange mix of celebration and mourning. The Spokesman-Review reported a “gay crowd of Gibson girls and derby-hatted Beau Brummels blowing horns and throwing confetti” for the modern buses in the parade. Yet, as the last trolley rolled by, the crowd grew downcast. At the park’s turnaround, the ceremony reached its dramatic climax. Bales of hay were piled inside the wooden trolley, and it was solemnly set ablaze, burning so fiercely it reddened the evening sky. As six women in bathing suits and firefighters’ hats doused the flames, souvenir hunters tore the charred remains apart, collecting pieces of a history that would never run on rails again.
Today, the Spokane Trolley Trails wind quietly beneath old-growth firs, yet each step retraces routes that once shaped regional growth. As an integral chapter in Spokane’s transportation evolution, these rail-to-trail corridors transform clattering streetcar beds into peaceful greenways. Hikers and cyclists now traverse the same gentle grades that ferried thousands to work, play, and prohibition-era bootleg runs. In their very existence, the trails celebrate a city that never stopped moving forward.
