Kenosha tram
The tram from Kenosha in the state of Wisconsin was opened on 17 June 2000 and is one of the youngest companies in the United States .
The railway is the successor to the railway that ran in the city between February 1, 1903 and February 15, 1932. The ring-shaped route through the Harbourpark district , created in 1998 on the former Chrysler factory site , was completed in April 2000 after the overhead lines had been installed in 1999. The first trams purchased from Toronto by the Toronto Lakefront Streetcar Line arrived in the city on May 4th. Since the Canadian cars had a track width of 1495 mm, they had to be provided with bogies from decommissioned cars from Chicago .
The route is around 2.7 kilometers long and is driven counter-clockwise. The “beginning” of the route is the Metra station , where trains to and from Chicago end. Around 80 percent of the route has a separate track structure, so that conflicts with individual traffic are largely excluded. The train has a total of 17 stops and passes the important facilities of daily life.
The purpose of the railway was to make the newly created district attractive and to attract potential residents and thus users of the railway. At first, when the railway opened, the number of passengers was quite modest at around 600 passengers per day. The races were run every 15 minutes between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. on weekdays and between 10 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. on weekends. The fare was 25 US cents per trip.
Since February 16, 2002, the nostalgic tram - old PCC railcars from 1951 - only run on weekends. Daily operation is only in the summer between Memorial Day , late May and Labor Day ( Labor Day ), early September. The reason were austerity measures by the state of Wisconsin. The payments to the communities were drastically cut.
The initiative for this railway went back to the director of the transport company Joseph McCarthy (not to be confused with the senator of the same name), who also pushed through the introduction of gas-powered buses in the city. Since he died unexpectedly at the age of 48 before the completion of the railway, it was decided to give the depot his name. It has been called the Joseph McCarthy Transit Center since then .