Operations
After the construction of the bridge, O&CB laid out streetcar lines throughout Omaha and its suburbs, including South Omaha, Benson, Dundee, and Florence. In 1888 Wright was elected Secretary of the company, and the O&CB built the first electric street railway line ever constructed in Iowa or Nebraska. In 1898 the Omaha Street Railway, later acquired by the O&CB, ordered new cars, repaired and refurbished older cars, and allocated $100,000 for improvements to the streetcar system in anticipation of providing to and from Omaha's Trans-Mississippi Exposition. This increased the capacity of the company's power plant at 20th and Nicholas Streets.
By 1902 all of the electric-powered railways in Omaha were consolidated in the O&CB. The company was sold to a New York City-based syndicate for $4,000,000 that year, with the syndicate taking control of all stock.
The Omaha and Council Bluffs Street Railway Company bought the Omaha and Council Bluffs Railway and Bridge Company in 1902, taking a hundred year lease on the city's rails. It also consumed other local transportation franchises, including the Omaha Street Railway Company and the Council Bluffs Street Railway Company.
When local banker Gurdon Wattles bought the company along with several competing lines and merged them into one unit called the Omaha Traction Company the O&CB ceased operating as an independent line. However, Wattles continued using the brand. In 1943 the company began training women as streetcar operators after many of its male drivers were called into military service during World War II. The women learned quickly and were paid the same wages as their male counterparts.
In the late 1940s the O&CB was the target of a general boycott called by the DePorres Club, a central group in Omaha's civil rights movement. The youth-led organization targeted the railroad for its segregation practices and poor service to the Near North Side neighborhood four years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
The still-standing Omaha and Council Bluffs Street Railway Company Car Barn at the intersection of South 10th Street and Pierce Street was the last active barn in the city. The O&CB line ceased operating on March 4, 1955.
Read more about this topic: Omaha And Council Bluffs Railway And Bridge Company
Famous quotes containing the word operations:
“There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“It may seem strange that any road through such a wilderness should be passable, even in winter, when the snow is three or four feet deep, but at that season, wherever lumbering operations are actively carried on, teams are continually passing on the single track, and it becomes as smooth almost as a railway.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)