The third in my series of maps depicting electric streetcar networks of the Pacific Northwest, one that both builds on my previous maps of Spokane and Portland and adds something new to the mix: geography.
The full project description follows, but you can view the map below or click here to view it in a full-screen window.
At first sight, the Yakima streetcar and interurban network may not look quite as impressive as the other two larger cities (which had dozens of lines each) but there’s one very special aspect that truly sets it apart: it’s still operating.
Opened on Christmas Day 1907, passenger service continued until February 1947 – long after other streetcars had faded away in Washington state – and freight service on the electric interurban lines continued right up to 1985, when the Union Pacific finally abandoned the by-then unprofitable system. However, a small touristic trolley service using the interurban lines had begun in 1974 and has continued up to the present day. If you’re ever in Yakima, be sure to visit the Yakima Valley Trolleys Museum – housed in the original 1910 car barn and power house – and maybe take a ride on one of their historical trolleys along Pine Street or even up to Selah.
For once, researching the lines of the network wasn’t a problem, thanks to Kenneth G. Johnsen’s excellent book Apple Country Interurban, and a whole slew of original engineering blueprints found on the YVT museum’s website. As seen below, the amount of detail on these is incredibly comprehensive and allowed a lot of extra detail to be included on the final map, often even including what kind of facilities were to be found at each stop – ranging from a full depot building down to a simple pole indicating that trains could stop there. City maps from 1918 and Sanborn maps from 1920 provided further supporting details. The only line which still lacks a bit of detail is the interurban line out to Henrybro, for which I haven’t come across a proper map yet.
Instead, the main challenge presented by this map was one of scale: the interurban lines headed far out into the surrounding countryside, making the city lines (the main focus of the previous maps in the series) shrink down into one corner of the map. Almost immediately, I decided that I would use an inset diagram to demonstrate how the city lines worked, while the main map would show the interurban lines in full over a simple one-colour indication of the extent of the city lines. While this worked well, early drafts of the map looked very empty and flat, simply because there was nothing to see in large parts of it!
I got to thinking that I’d like to include an indication of geography in the map, not only to provide some much-needed texture to the flat map, but also to indicate how the railroads were governed by it. The line north from Yakima to Selah had to pass through the narrow Selah Gap, which already had the main Northern Pacific line passing through it. The interurban line follows almost the same path as the NP line, but necessarily higher up the valley wall, making for a spectacular journey through the gap. Similarly, the Cowiche Canyon branch of the North Yakima & Valley Railway has to traverse the eponymous canyon on its way out to Tieton.
A request for assistance in making a suitable hillshade for the map was met by Daniel Huffman, whose willingness to share his knowledge and help others always astounds me. With his hillshade now acting as a canvas for the map, I pretty much redrew all the lines to ensure everything lined up properly (I’d been a little too diagrammatic in that earlier draft!). Quite remarkably, there are a couple of places on the hillshade where the old interurban right-of-way could still be discerned: normally when the line dropped off the edge of a steep hill or similar. As a result of all this work, this is probably as close to an actual geographical map as you’ll ever see from me, though it’s important to note that I’ve still simplified a lot of things and this is definitely not a fully-accurate trackage map (although I could almost make one with all the data I’ve gathered!)
Note that the path of the rivers on the main map are based off city maps of Yakima from 1918, and often show a substantially different path to today’s rivers (seen on the small “Current Trolley Lines” map at the bottom right). The most obvious difference is the presence of the two huge log ponds that were part of the Cascade Lumber Mill on the edge of town – served by the YVT’s North Eighth Street line.
Once the main map was drawn, I adapted the city line diagram from it – separating the eight routes of the time out into their own lines, and indicating some of the common ways that the routes interlined as they passed through downtown by using similar colours for the respective east- and west-side lines. These common interlinings are all taken from the map on the inside cover of Apple Country Interurban, though there’s plenty of photographic evidence within that same book that other interlinings were sometimes used – with interurban cars sometimes even extending their run to the far end of a city line on the east side of town. The YVT only had a small fleet of cars without a lot of redundancy, and I feel that they often just went where they were needed at the time. Headways were never spectacular: most city lines only ran twice an hour, and some just once an hour. Six trains a day went out to Wiley City and Henrybro, while eight a day ran on the Selah Line – four only went as far north as Taylor, while the other four continued all the way to the end of the line at Speyers.
One oddity of the network is the Orchard Line: it’s never included as a city line, nor does it ever appear on interurban timetables. Despite the YVT’s franchise requiring it to carry passengers on all its lines, it seems that this line was treated as more of a freight spur (collecting produce from the farms in the area) than an actual “line”, so it existed in a slightly grey area.
Because there aren’t many lines that needed to be listed in the map’s legend, I’ve included some extra historical information about each of them (opening and closing dates, etc.), as well as a small map of the current trolley operations on Pine Street and out to Selah. Of the 48 miles that operated in 1920, only about five remain in use today.
As always, comments are welcome below! Prints of the map are available for purchase in the Transit Maps print store.
