National Tramway Museum - Crich - August 01, 1979
New York Third Avenue Railway System number 674 is the sole representative at Crich of the vast North American tramway systems that by 1917 covered some 45,000 miles of track across the United States alone, over which around 80,000 trams (or trolley cars as they were referred to over there) plied for service.
The Third Avenue Railway System was a street tramway operator whose main line ran along Manhattan’s Third Avenue with additional lines in the Bronx, Westchester County and elsewhere in Manhattan.
By the time 674 came to be built, in 1939, streetcars in New York were facing an uncertain future as the mayor (Fiorello La Guardia), who had taken office in 1934, took the view that they failed to project the modern image that he favoured.
He indicated that he didn’t want to renew tramway licenses once the current ones expired, which would have entailed a total replacement of the trams by 1960 at the latest.
By the end of the thirties the TARS was, in any event, in a dire financial situation; having gone bankrupt in 1908 it had never fully recovering since then and the fleet was, by this stage, worn out.
Consequently, investment in completely new tramcars was out of the question. Instead, 61 relatively new second hand cars were bought. In addition, the existing fleet was reworked by the TARS workshops to produce new looking cars using as much existing equipment as possible to fill the gap.
No fewer than 336 of these ‘renewed’ cars were built by TARS in its own workshops between 1934 and 1939, 674 being one of the last of these to be constructed.
