Clang of streetcars still echoes for ex-driver

By Debbie Messina
The Virginian-Pilot
© November 7, 2009

NORFOLK

The steel rails are the same. So are the overhead electric lines.

But the vehicle?

Randall Pike, who, at 91, might be the oldest living Norfolk streetcar driver, said the city’s new light-rail vehicles feel like an airplane compared to the “box” he operated in the 1940s.

“There’s no comparison,” Pike said Friday as he sat in the driver’s seat of one of the light-rail cars parked near Norfolk State University. “It’s beautiful.”

Although the control panel, with its computer screen and an array of colored buttons, appears more like it belongs in a cockpit than a transit car, Pike was eager to take it for a spin.

“Oh, yeah,” Pike said with a boyish grin. “I think I could go. Everything’s labeled.”

Not so fast, said W. Randy Wright, Norfolk councilman and Hampton Roads Transit commissioner who offered Pike a sneak peek Friday.

The Tide will not start running for another year – 62 years after the brakes were put on Norfolk’s elaborate network of trolleys. Sixty-seven miles of track connected downtown, Ocean View,

Willoughby, Norfolk Naval Station, South Norfolk and many neighborhoods in between.

From 1941 until the street car’s demise in 1948, Pike was one of the men behind the wheel.

He was behind the wheel Dec. 7, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He worked a double shift, ferrying sailors from the downtown entertainment district back to the Navy base for duty.

“All day long, I carried men back,” Pike said.

He was behind the wheel Sept. 2, 1945, when World War II ended, stuck at the corner of Brambleton Avenue and Granby Street for hours because the street revelers were too thick for him to pass. “I just watched and enjoyed it,” Pike said.

Streetcars were the most popular mode of transportation at that time. It was wartime, and few people had personal cars.

Tickets cost 10 cents each or three for a quarter. Fares were dependent on the length of the trip – it took two tickets to go from downtown to Ocean View.

“We got so full sometimes we couldn’t get anybody else on,” Pike said.

But things started changing after the war, he said. People clamored for more modern transportation such as buses.

With no tracks, Pike said, “y ou could go anywhere on a bus.”

It was the end of an era that began in 1870, with horse- drawn carts that ran on a track between the west end of Main Street and fairgrounds on Church Street, according to city historian Peggy Haile McPhillips. The fare: 7 cents.

Over the decades, there were highs and lows. In 1872, all but two of the railway’s 35 horses were stricken by an illness, and workers had to be hired to pull the cars until the horses could resume their duties, McPhillips said.

The horses were retired in 1894 with the advent of the first electric cars.

The final streetcar run went from downtown to Ocean View at midnight on July 10, 1948. The riot squad had to be called because souvenir hunters smashed windows and looted the car.

Pike made the switch to driving buses until he retired in 1975.

He is amused that public transportation in Norfolk is coming full circle with the return of a modern version of the street car – light rail.

Also promising is the possible return of high -speed passenger rail, which is proposed to run from Richmond into Norfolk at Harbor Park, where work is under way on a light-rail station.

Pike once shuttled train passengers from what’s now Harbor Park in his streetcar.

“I’m all for the light-rail service,” said Pike, a Virginia Beach resident. “I hope to see it go all the way to the Beach.”