This time I have to include two corners, though both share something in common.
As a pedestrian, for years I wondered why the intersection of Jaeger and Hanford had such a wide, sweeping arc at only one side of the street. A half-block south and east, another corner has the same sweeping arc.
Several years later I learned that the sweeping arc of this corner, as well as the subsequent corner on Hanford and 4th, was designed so that the street car line could make the turn from and onto typically narrow streets.
While I know almost nothing about the former street car line that ran through the neighborhood, I did find this page which discusses the different gauges of track used, as well as some great old pictures of Columbus streetcars. According to the information provided here, the line was known as the Steelton Line.
It was this streetcar line that fed residents into the newly developed land known as Merion Village and helped connect the neighborhood to other parts of the city for years to come. Currently, COTA buses (#8 an #16) run along portions of this line making Merion Village one of the city’s best public-transit served neighborhoods.
This project brought to you by the Columbus Social Media Cafe.
The maps of the old streetcar lines are on that same site Jeff:
http://www.columbusrailroads.com/streetcars.htm
It looks like it went north on Jaeger, turned left at Reinhard, and right on Mohawk. The same wide curves can be seen on Reinhard just like Hanford.
The curb cutouts were not so much for the streetcars as for the interurbans that shared the Steelton line tracks. The Scioto Valley Traction interurban line ran from Columbus to Obetz Jt. where it split with one line going to Lancaster and the other to Chillicothe. The SVT interurbans were larger than the streetcars with a longer wheel base. Sometimes they ran two and three car passenger trains as well as four car freight trains on those curves. Imagine a four car freight train rattling up Mohawk Street through German village – those were the days!
There was also an interurban that traveled north from Columbus to Marion that had curb cutouts at Hudson and Indianola as well as Arcadia and Indianola.
Alex Campbell
columbusrailroads.com
John and Alex – thanks for the additional information.
I’ve always been intrigued by the fact that inter-urbans traveled between Columbus and Chillicothe. I used to commute to Chillicothe and would have liked to have been able to not put all those miles on the car.
Perhaps again…someday. It would be a boon to a town such as Chillicothe to have readily available public transit to and from Columbus. It would certainly help their local economy and shore up housing prices.