[1] The next attempt at public transit arrived in the spring of 1830, when Gilbert Vanderwerken's Omnibuses, horse-drawn wagons, began running from Georgetown to the Navy Yard.

[1] The company ran the first streetcar in Washington, D.C., from the Capitol to the State Department (then housed at the current Treasury Building) starting on July 29, 1862.

[12] In 1888, the Anacostia and Potomac River expanded from the Navy Yard to Congressional Cemetery, and past Garfield Park to the Center Market (now the National Archives) in downtown.

[9] The last streetcar company to begin operation during the horsecar era was the Capitol, North O Street and South Washington Railway.

Horses needed to be housed and fed, created large amounts of waste, had difficulty climbing hills and were difficult to dispose of.

For example, the Washington and Georgetown experimented with a steam motor car in the 1870s and 1880s which was run on Pennsylvania Avenue NW near the Capitol several times, but was never placed in permanent use.

But the editor of the Washington Star newspaper led a successful crusade against the use of overhead wires strung along streets to transmit electricity from steam-driven power stations to the streetcars themselves.

Instead of this method, common in other cities but which the editor found aesthetically displeasing, D.C. would adopt a far more expensive and finicky system involving an electrical conduit laid between rails in the street.

[1] In 1896, Congress directed the Eckington and Soldier's Home to try compressed air motors and to substitute underground electric power for all its horse and overhead trolley lines in the city.

[9] After completing a bridge over Rock Creek at Calvert Street on July 21, 1891, the line was extended through Adams Morgan and north on Connecticut Avenue to Chevy Chase Lake in Maryland.

That same year,[18] the Tennallytown and Rockville Railway received its charter and began building tracks from the G&T's northern terminus to today's D.C. neighborhood of Friendship Heights and the Maryland state line.

[24] On June 8, 1896, it was given permission to enter the District of Columbia and connect to the spur of the Brightwood line that ran on Butternut St NW.

The route was intended to promote development of company-owned land near the tracks, but it never successfully competed with established rail lines in the same area.

Congress attempted to deal with this fractured transit system by requiring them to accept transfers, set standard pricing and by allowing them to use one another's track.

[1] Streetcars were unionized in 1916 when local 689 of the Amalgamated Association of Street, Electric Railway and Motor Coach Employees of America won recognition after a three-day strike.

The W&OD agreed not to vie for rights on the new bridge, and Capital Traction, which had been seeking cross-river operations, built a new terminal for the Virginia railroad next to its own new loop in Rosslyn.

[61] In 1948, Capital Transit substituted buses on the Benning-Rosslyn line between Kenilworth and the Seat Pleasant loop; and between the corner of 13th and New York Avenue.

[62] In 1946 in a decision by the United States Supreme Court in North American Co. v. Securities and Exchange Commission,[63] the Supreme Court upheld the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 and forced North American, because it also owned the Potomac Electric Power Co., to sell its shares of Capital Transit.

Buyers were hard to come by, but on September 12, 1949, Louis Wolfson and his three brothers purchased from North American 46.5% of the company's stock for $20 per share and the WREC was dissolved.

[47] Capital Transit lost one of its last freight customers in 1954 when the East Washington Railway took over the delivery of coal from the B&O to the PEPCO power plant at Benning.

[69] The last scheduled run, filled with enthusiasts and drunken college students, left 14th and Colorado at 2:17 am and arrived at Navy Yard ten minutes late at 3:05 am.

[76] One of the Fort Worth trams, Capital Transit 1551, was repainted and transferred to the McKinney heritage streetcar in Dallas in 2002, but has been out of service since 2006 with mechanical and electrical problems.

Asphalt covers the loop tracks of the Capital Transit connection behind the closed restaurant on Calvert Street NW, immediately east of the Duke Ellington Bridge.

[126] The C Street NW/NE tunnel beneath the Upper Senate Park remained in use as a one-way service road adjacent to the Capitol, but since 9/11 it has been closed to the public.

[143] The Bureau of Engraving and Printing underground loop is now part of a parking structure and storage area that is located directly underneath 14th Street SW.

[71] Much of it is still extant from the Georgetown Car Barn all the way to the Dalecarlia Reservoir filtration plant in DC and from the District line to Cabin John in Maryland.

[144][145] DC condemned the right-of-way from Norton Street, NW to Foxhall Road in 1982 to construct a crosstown water main and was ordered to pay D.C.

[148] In 1995, developers proposed building on the Rider's Fund site (lot 822) between Foundry Branch and Georgetown's Canal Road entrance, but that project found strong opposition from neighbors and the Park Service.

[151] The wide median of Pennsylvania Avenue SE from the Capitol to Barney Circle was built in 1903 to serve as a streetcar right-of-way.

Four tall lampposts for Capital Traction's overhead wires on the Connecticut Avenue bridge over Klingle Valley in Cleveland Park.