Charlotte, NC — Visit to Gomaco

Rail Transit Online – May 2003

A representative of the Charlotte Area Transit System paid a visit to the Gomaco Trolley Co. in Ida Grove, Iowa, to inspect a pair of replica Birney trolleys headed to Little Rock’s River Rail streetcar line.  CATS officials want to know if the cars can be adapted to run on Charlotte’s nearly complete two-mile (3.2 km) line between the South End and Uptown.  “We want to make sure they're what we need,” CATS Deputy Director Keith Parker told The Charlotte Observer.  “If they'll work, then we'll start full-scale negotiations.”  The idea is to lease the Little Rock streetcars while Gomaco is building a pair of similar units for CATS.  Charlotte had also sought leased cars from Portland and Tampa but transit agencies in both cities said they couldn’t spare any of their rolling stock.  Service on the Charlotte line was supposed to begin this summer using historic cars owned by Charlotte Trolley, a volunteer group, until an inspection of the old cars found them too fragile for daily use (see RTOL, March 2003).