Salt Lake City's Trolley Square, Utah

Once the site of Salt Lake City’s trolley car barns, Trolley Square is now a bustling public marketplace that commemorates the city’s transit history.

Historic Trolley Square is one of downtown Salt Lake City’s most popular tourist attractions. Though it is more renowned for its shopping center, Trolley Square also features a Trolley History Museum, dedicated to the Square’s storied lineage as the former site of the Utah Light and Rail Company’s trolley car barns.

Salt Lake City’s streetcar history began in 1872. The Salt Lake Street Railway Company, formed by prominent Mormons including two sons of Brigham Young, built the first tracks, along which mules would pull the new streetcars. The mule-drawn cars were popular, and within two decades the network had expanded to include fourteen miles of track and twenty-one cars. The mules polluted the tracks with waste, however, and thus the system required constant maintenance. The advent of centralized electrification allowed for the Company to replace the mule-drawn line with Salt Lake City’s very first electric streetcar.

The city’s early electric trolley system was a hit with the public, featuring over sixty cars and over forty miles of track within the first few years. However, it was also chaotic. Following the success of the Salt Lake Street Railway Company, more than a dozen companies fought bitterly and vigorously for ridership and line control. This discordant period ended in 1901, when most of the companies merged into the Consolidated Railway and Power Company, which itself became the Utah Light and Railway Company in 1904.

The Salt Lake City trolley took its next major step forward in 1906, when Union Pacific Railroad executive E.H. Harriman purchased a controlling interest in the Light and Railway Company. Harriman wanted to turn the Salt Lake streetcar into a world-class model of inexpensive electrified mass transit. He added eighty miles of new track to the network, and also constructed a massive new holding facility for the network’s rapidly expanding fleet of cars on land. Due to the risk of fires at this hub of electric streetcar activity, Harriman’s architects also constructed a water tower in the vicinity.

Harriman’s efforts paid off in the short term. By 1914, the Salt Lake City network operated 144 trolley cars on 146 miles of track in Salt Lake and nearby communities, and the system served as a model for others throughout the United States. However, the advent of automobiles would ultimately doom the Salt Lake streetcar. As more automobiles entered the streets, passengers complained of congestion. Even the Light and Traction Company’s new trolley buses, designed to operate without tracks on the street itself, couldn’t compete. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Light and Railway Company closed lines and gradually phased out the trolley. On May 31, 1941, the last trolley car completed its run.

The former car barns of Trolley Square faced the prospect of demolition in 1969, but a local family purchased them in 1972. Soon that same year, architect Wally Wright converted the car barns into a shopping center and festival marketplace. Light rail returned to Utah when the TRAX system began operation in 1999, but Trolley Square is still a powerful reminder of when electric trolleys dominated transportation in Salt Lake City.

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