Making Connections for Visitors: The Downtown - Canal District Trolley Line

Proposed Downtown - Canal District Visitor's Trolley Line

Detail of Canal District Section of Proposed Downtown - Canal District Visitor's Trolley Line

The Airline transit line mentioned in previous posts would be targeted towards Worcester's everyday commuters and visitors utilizing ORH. My experience has been that if you want to get tourists to your city to park once and use public transit to get around your city you either need to have a subway system or design a transit system such as Philadelphia's Phlash Buses.

Dan Benoit and I have had a number of discussions about ways to run buses in and around downtown to help visitors get around - I originally though of a loop that wound serve Main St. and connect to the Canal District and Shrewsbury St. Dan's idea was to create a trolley that would connect Union station and City Hall (and possibly extending down at least a portion of Shrewsbury St. if I recall our conversations correctly)

I really liked Dan's idea, but connecting just City Hall and Union Station seemed too short to be worth it for me so I began to think about how we could expand the line to connect other parts of downtown which resulted in the map above. The proposed 5 mile (assuming double track) trolley line would run from Gateway Park in the north end of downtown (the trolley yard could be in the unused industrial area between Gateway Park and the highway, near the existing railroad tracks), travel under Lincoln Square using the existing "Summer Nationals burnout tunnel," then south along Main St. until it reached Harrington Corner at which point it would travel east down Front St. to Union Station. At Union Station the line would travel under the mainline tracks south down Harding St. (alongside the recreated canal would be pretty neat!). The line would make a u-turn on the south side of Kelley Square and then head north along Water St., then west along Franklin St. where it then meets up again with the southbound line at Union Station.

This route hits a lot of the main visitor sites - The Worcester Art Museum, Aud and Courthouse (I am a big fan of branding Lincoln Square as a museum district and filling these buildings with museums), the new courthouse and MCPHS, Mechanics Hall and DCU Center (one block east), City Hall and the Common, Hanover Theatre (just 2 1/2 blocks south of City Hall), CitySquare, Union Station, Canal District, Kelley Square and the proposed new home for the New England Revolution at Wyman-Gordon Field in the Junction District. There are of course a thousand variations to this route and extensions could go in a variety of directions (the ones I like best would be to continue the line from Lincoln Square west along Highland St. terminating at Elm Park - tying in the Highland St. and Park Ave. commercial districts, West Side and WPI and Becker; and extending the line on the south end down Harding and Millbury Sts. to Brosnihan Square and then along the railroad ROW to what was the proposed site of the Blackstone Valley visitors center - tying in Green Island, Holy Cross and connecting with the existing Blackstone corridor).

This route would also provide an opportunity to showcase a lot of Worcester's history (it roughly follows the historic canal route from Lincoln Square) and one possibility for increasing the authentic historic experience would be to procure and refurbish historic trolleys built by the Osgood Bradley Car Company formerly of Worcester. I understand that at one time they produced trolleys that were used in cities across the US (including Worcester) and some may even still be in use in a few parts of the world today. It not impossible, both Philadelphia's Gerard Ave. Trolley Line and the T's Mattapan High Speed Line run refurbished historic PCC trolleys I understand.