The first electric railway in Los Angeles was built in 1887 to facilitate the sales of a real estate tract on Pico Street.

Though the real estate venture was successful, after an explosion in the power station, the Pico Street electric line closed, seemingly for good.

Development of an effective electric transportation system based on the new Sprague-based technology began in earnest with the arrival in Los Angeles of Moses Sherman, his brother-in-law Eli P. Clark and San Francisco investors late in 1890.

Sherman, originally a teacher from Vermont, had moved to the Arizona territory in 1874 where he was involved in business and civic affairs, real estate, and street railways.

They were forced to build a bridge over the Los Angeles River and Santa Fe rails, which postponed the opening of the line until September 26, 1893.

[10][18] The new management purchased new cars and began converting all the existing horsecar and cable lines to electricity, a task completed by June, 1896.

Even without competition from the jitneys, LARy was forced to cut lines and switch to smaller, more efficient Birney streetcars to maintain profitability.

LARy and Pacific Electric succeeded in defeating McAdoo's scheme through a public referendum by proposing their own system, the Los Angeles Motor Bus Company.

[26] National City Lines, along with its investors that included Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California (now Chevron Corporation) and General Motors, were later convicted of conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to local transit companies controlled by National City Lines and other companies[n 1] in what became known as the General Motors streetcar conspiracy.

These cars seemed to dominate the Southern California landscape in the eyes of the world, to a large extent because they were featured in many early movies.

[31] Center-entrance Cars (Type C), also called “sowbellies”, were modified older Standards with a low-step center entrance and exit to accommodate the “hobble skirt” craze of the early teens.

After the disastrous Pacific Electric wreck at Vineyard in July, 1913, the drawbacks of high-speed wooden cars led companies to turn to steel construction.

The streamlined Presidential Conference Car, or PCC, developed by the industry as a hoped-for savior, were the very latest in transit engineering: modern, comfortable, sleek, and smooth-running .

Shorties or Maggies (Type A) - When the Huntington/Hellman syndicate acquired LARy, the line had a large variety of existing wooden cars.

These light cars needed only a single operator, consumed less electricity, and produced less wear on the tracks, which did result in reduced costs.

First deployed in September, 1920 on lighter lines, their slow, rough ride, hard seats, and lack of open sections made the cars unpopular with riders.

[48] Under NCL a three-color "fruit salad" scheme was adopted, with a yellow body, a white roof, and a sea-foam green midsection.

[47] Original Shops - When the Huntington syndicate acquired the Los Angeles Railway system in 1898, its headquarters was the former property of the old cable car company at Central Avenue and Wilde Streets, just east of downtown.

[52] In 1946, the old shops were closed by new owners, Los Angeles Transit Lines, who used the southern half of the property for maintenance and repairs.

Facilities included carpentry, machine and other shops, parts storage, offices, the employee ball park, and cottages for the families of Mexicans employed at the yard.

The only division that operated streetcars after 1955 (it was closed in 1963), it never housed buses; the Los Angeles Convention Center was built there as part of an urban renewal project.

Once the Huntington Pacific Electric Building was completed in January 1905, at 6th and Main streets, both PE and LARy moved their offices there.

Early streetcar power systems generated 500- to 600-volt direct current (DC) which was transmitted to the copper overhead wires via feeder cables.

LARy then began constructing substations which would convert the higher-voltage AC power to the 600 volts required by the motors used on the cars.

[69] Electricity from PL&P’s completed Kern River Company’s hydroelectric project reached Los Angeles in December, 1905.

[70] With a generating capacity of 17,500 kW, its output was transmitted over 123 miles to a receiving station in Los Angeles, which then distributed the power to its primary customers, the electric railways.

In order to build these new projects, Huntington organized a new Pacific Light and Power Company, capitalized at 40 million dollars, in early 1910.

The new PL&P began its most ambitious project, a large hydroelectric system on the San Joaquin River called Big Creek.

After two years of construction on the South Fork of the San Joaquin River, and the expenditure of 13.9 million dollars, the Borel station of the Big Creek project began generating 60,000 kW of electricity to Los Angeles in December, 1913, which enabled Huntington close the remaining steam plants, though the Redondo plant was kept as a standby.

[75][76] In 1917, after Huntington had begun to concentrate more on his legacy art and book collections, he sold his interest in PL&P to Southern California Edison, but not without negotiating a contract for the company to continue to furnish power to LARy and the Pacific Electric Railway.