Paul Weyrich was the Conservative’s Conservative. He had been a Young Republican and active in the Goldwater campaign of 1964. He went on to be co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation. He passed away in 2008.
However, he had another side, which is where I read his work in the 1990s – he was the main person behind the New Electric Railway Journal, a publication that advocated for “bringing back streetcars” using the generosity of the Federal Treasury to fund his favorite projects.
He took a personal interest especially in bringing back streetcars to Kenosha, Wisconsin, a place where he lived as a young man for the low price of only $5 million in government fundint.
Photo of streetcar in Kenosha taken by Paul Weyrich
The idea behind the project was to buy some decommissioned streetcars from Toronto, put down a loop of track connecting the Metra commuter rail station in downtown, with a pier area extending into Lake Michigan – to encourage creation of high density housing for commuters who worked in Chicago or Milwaukee.
Kenosha is a town half way between Chicago and Milwaukee. It’s main economic reason for being was the automotive industry. It was the home of Nash Motors – which would merge with Kelvinator (the refrigerator people), and then became American Motors with the merger with the Hudson Motor company. A few years later, George Romney (father of Mitt) would run the company. AMC acquired Jeep in 1970. AMC affiliated with the French carmaker Renault, and ultimately gave up and was purchased by Chrysler in 1985. At its peak, AMC employed 14,000 people in Kenosha. By 1987, Chrysler decided to end car production in Kenosha, leaving only an engine plant that employed about 500 people – and just recently closed. The development hoped for by the streetcar system was on the land formerly occupied by the Chrysler assmebly plant.
So Kenosha has 1.7 miles of streetcar track, 5 working streetcars (only 3 of which can run at a time or the circuit breaker pops), and a state of the art PCC streetcar repair facility (the last PCC streetcars in the United States were made in 1952). Just recently, a YouTube video surfaced of a truck load of 50 brand new streetcar wheels being delivered (each of the 5 streetcars has 8 wheels).
Pork isn’t pork when it’s something you like, right?
The city recently was awarded $4 million to extend the streetcar system another 3 miles, although there is no plan in place how or why to do it. The city has to come up with $1 million, which is not very likely to happen.
