Thanks to Brad the Transit Guy (@bradforte1), for sharing the above video on Twitter, which portrays tranquil scenes of the 1960s Cleveland Rapid Transit at stops across the city: Airport! University Circle! Puritas!

The grainy, subterranean footage and languorous orchestral accompaniment gives it a sort of Clockwork Orange vibe.

Though the rapid fleet itself and the signage have been upgraded — to say nothing of passengers’ fashion choices — several of the stations are more or less unchanged in the 21st century.  

Shot-for-shot remake, anyone?

This article appears in Oct 4-10, 2017.

Sam Allard is a former senior writer at Scene.

5 replies on “Cleveland’s Rapid Transit Still Looks a lot Like it did in the 1960s”

  1. Somebody is yanking your coupler, Sam…those are Chicago Transit Authority 2000 series cars, which ran mostly on what is now called the CTA Green Line (connecting the South and West Sides) from the mid-60s through the mid-90s.

    That yellow sign is a dead giveaway. As is the livery of the cars themselves…Alpine White and Everglade Green…yes, those are the actual names of the colors. I lived in Chicago and its suburbs for 36 years. I remember them well. Took them to White Sox night games in the 70s and 80s, when I worked downtown..

    Ironically, however, the 2000-series cars had the shortest service life of all the so-called High Performance cars. Over the decades, the 2000 series cars presented a variety of maintenance problems…the aluminum bodies rusted quickly in the Chicago winters, while snow caused motors to short out and brakes to become non-functional (especially after the 1979 blizzard). In short, they were crap.

    Thirty years is not a long lifespan for transit vehicles. There are streetcars in San Francisco that have survived since the Forties, and the St. Charles Line cars in New Orleans date from the Twenties. Of course, they don’t have the Midwestern winters, which are killers. Literally.

    The cars you see today on RTA’s Rapid Lines date mostly from the Eighties. The Red Line has the Tokyu cars from Japan and the Blue and Green Lines use the Italian LRVs made by Breda. Both types probably have maybe another decade of life left.

    The dude who gave you this video is probably confusing the CTA 2000s with the Bluebird cars that ran in Cleveland in the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies. But they aren’t even close in design or appearance to the ones in Chicago. That image is definitely a 2000 of Sixties origin…the car number appears to be 2171. And the sign is most definitely CTA.

    Hate to ruin your story, but as for the video, it is what it is.

    Chuckles the Clown

  2. The Shaker and Van Aken cars are much improved from the old trolley cars that were in use in the 1970s and before, which dated to the 1940s or earlier. Most of those cars were falling apart before they were finally replaced too,

  3. I remember the red and chrome cars on the Red Line though. Lucky with the city down in population by half in the last 40 years that RTA can afford to keep the Red Line open,

  4. To Chuckles The Clown if you would have bothered to watch the whole clip you would have seen that it is from Cleveland the first frame is from Chicago because I was unable to edit it out on Twitter when I uploaded it

  5. My apologies to Sam, who probably didn’t know the difference.
    But you obviously did. Maybe a disclaimer at the start of the video might have helped.

    Chuckles the Clown

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