Birney

The design was small and light and was intended to be an economical means of providing frequent service at a lower infrastructure and labor cost than conventional streetcars.

Birney was an engineer with the firm of Stone & Webster, an operator of a number of trolley systems in the United States in the early part of the 20th century.

Birneys were small and light, about a third the weight of conventional cars of the period; were of rugged, standardized construction; mass-produced and inexpensively built.

The advent of World War I made single-person operation additionally attractive as it addressed the wartime labor shortage.

[3] Double-truck Birney cars were sold to a number of systems, including that of Tampa, Florida,[1] and to the Texas Interurban Railway, which used them exclusively.

Their limited passenger capacity rendered them unsuitable for busy routes and rush hour service, causing them to be relegated to minor lines or to be sold mostly to small-town streetcar systems.

Its initial rise and fall notwithstanding, the Birney car was useful and durable, and many were shipped to streetcar systems in other countries, especially ones located in smaller cities and towns, where they served for additional decades.

For example, the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, bought up Birneys secondhand from other systems (including 22 acquired from the Toronto Transportation Commission (TTC) and five from Bakersfield and Kern Electric Railway) across North America to build an "all-Birney fleet" and keep its streetcar system going in the difficult years of the Great Depression and World War II, finally retiring its last car in 1949.

[5][6] Although the vast majority of the cars built were sold to streetcar operators in North America (including in Mexico and Cuba), a small number went to much more distant places, such as Australia and New Zealand.

[11][12] A number of Birney cars remain in use today in North America at trolley museums and heritage streetcar operations.

Single examples of original Birney cars are in service on heritage streetcar lines in Tampa, Florida; Fort Collins, Colorado; San Jose, California, and Fort Smith, Arkansas, as well as on the M-Line Trolley line in Dallas, Texas.

In Australia, seven of the eight Birney cars imported there have survived in operating condition: five are at Bendigo Tramways including the two ex-Geelong cars and three from Adelaide, one G type at the Adelaide Tramway Museum, St Kilda, and one Melbourne X class housed at the Hawthorn tram depot in Melbourne.