Conduit Plan

from Street Railway Journal , circa 1895

This isn't your basic track of two rails and wooden crossties. The track structure extends some two and a half feet into the earth. Under the paving blocks are cast iron yokes 5 feet apart, the trapezoidal shape shown here and in the previous line drawing. The yoke holds the shape of the lengthwise pieces, keeping the rails the right distance apart and keeping the conduit open.

The diagram above shows a double-track cable installation, but the basics are the same on Broadway. There is a yoke every 5 feet, and a pair of insulator covers around the conduit every 15 feet, and a cleaning manhole cover every 105 feet, of which every fourth one (420 feet apart) was also a slightly larger feeder manhole. It's a lot of cast iron and concrete. And you wondered why they didn't lift the tracks?

But in some places they did lift this track. Look at the similar pavement work in Amsterdam Avenue (110th to 112th Streets), which had conduit cars, and you may have looked farther downtown this past year in Columbus Avenue, which was a cable line converted to conduit, and you don't see any track. On those lines, streetcars were discontinued about 1935. The Broadway cars ran until after the war, and by then no one wanted the scrap iron, or at least not enough to pay for mining this difficult ore.

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