Trolley Car Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Trolley Car. Here they are! All 45 of them:

I used to fear their deaths--the car! the dog! the sea! the germ!--until I realized it need never be a problem: on the trolley, on the way to the mortuary, I would put my hands into their ribs and take their hearts and swallow them, and give birth to them again, so that they would never, ever end.
Caitlin Moran (How to Be a Woman)
A trolley car, a pair of tennis shoes? These, at one time when we were children, were invested with magic for us.
Ray Bradbury (Zen in the Art of Writing)
So he bought tickets to the Greyhound and they climbed, painfully, inch by inch and with the knowledge that, once they reached the top, there would be one breath-taking moment when the car would tip precariously into space, over an incline six stories steep and then plunge, like a plunging plane. She buried her head against him, fearing to look at the park spread below. He forced himself to look: thousands of little people and hundreds of bright little stands, and over it all the coal-smoke pall of the river factories and railroad yards. He saw in that moment the whole dim-lit city on the last night of summer; the troubled streets that led to the abandoned beaches, the for-rent signs above overnight hotels and furnished basement rooms, moving trolleys and rising bridges: the cagework city, beneath a coalsmoke sky.
Nelson Algren (Never Come Morning)
Look what can happen in this country, they'd say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for 19 years, so poor she can't afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car. Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolley-bus.
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
Imagine that a trolley car is going down a track. Further down the track are five people who do not hear the trolley and who will not be able to get out of the way. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough time to stop the trolley before it hits and kills them. The only way to avoid killing these five people is to switch the trolley to another track. But, unfortunately, there is one person standing on that track, also too close for the trolley to stop before killing him. Now imagine that there is a bystander standing by the track switch who must make a choice: do nothing, which leads to the death of the five people on the current track, or act to divert the trolley to the other track, which leads to the death of the single person.
Mark D. White (Batman and Philosophy: The Dark Knight of the Soul (The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Book 9))
Very few people know where they will die, But I do; in a brick-faced hospital, Divided, not unlike Caesarean Gaul, Into three parts; the Dean Memorial Wing, in the classic cast of 1910, Green-grated in unglazed, Aeolian Embrasures; the Maud Wiggin Building, which Commemorates a dog-jawed Boston bitch Who fought the brass down to their whipcord knees In World War I, and won enlisted men Some decent hospitals, and, being rich, Donated her own granite monument; The Mandeville Pavilion, pink-brick tent With marble piping, flying snapping flags Above the entry where our bloody rags Are rolled in to be sponged and sewn again. Today is fair; tomorrow, scourging rain (If only my own tears) will see me in Those jaundiced and distempered corridors Off which the five-foot-wide doors slowly close. White as my skimpy chiton, I will cringe Before the pinpoint of the least syringe; Before the buttered catheter goes in; Before the I.V.’s lisp and drip begins Inside my skin; before the rubber hand Upon the lancet takes aim and descends To lay me open, and upon its thumb Retracts the trouble, a malignant plum; And finally, I’ll quail before the hour When the authorities shut off the power In that vast hospital, and in my bed I’ll feel my blood go thin, go white, the red, The rose all leached away, and I’ll go dead. Then will the business of life resume: The muffled trolley wheeled into my room, The off-white blanket blanking off my face, The stealing secret, private, largo race Down halls and elevators to the place I’ll be consigned to for transshipment, cased In artificial air and light: the ward That’s underground; the terminal; the morgue. Then one fine day when all the smart flags flap, A booted man in black with a peaked cap Will call for me and troll me down the hall And slot me into his black car. That’s all.
L.E. Sissman
Our behavior is as absurd and incomprehensible with respect to the first drink as that of an individual with a passion, say, for jay-walking. He gets a thrill out of skipping in front of fast-moving vehicles. He enjoys himself for a few years in spite of friendly warnings. Up to this point you would label him as a foolish chap having queer ideas of fun. Luck then deserts him and he is slightly injured several times in succession. You would expect him, if he were normal, to cut it out. Presently he is hit again and this time has a fractured skull. Within a week after leaving the hospital a fast-moving trolley car breaks his arm. He tells you he has decided to stop jay-walking for good, but in a few weeks he breaks both legs. On through the years this conduct continues, accompanied by his continual promises to be
Alcoholics Anonymous (Alcoholics Anonymous)
And at last, the dearest, most improbable sound of all— the sound of a green trolley car going around a comer— a trolley burdened with brown and alien and beautiful people, and the sound of other people running and calling out with triumph as they leaped up and swung aboard and vanished around a corner on the shrieking rails and were borne away in the sun-blazed distance to leave only the sound of tortillas frying on the market stoves, or was it merely the ever rising and falling hum and burn of static quivering along two thousand miles of copper wire . . .
Ray Bradbury (Dandelion Wine)
Sleet was falling through a motionless blanket of smog. It was early morning. I was riding in the Lincoln sedan of Dr. Asa Breed. I was vaguely ill, still a little drunk from the night before. Dr. Breed was driving. Tracks of a long-abandoned trolley system kept catching the wheels of his car.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Cat's Cradle)
Ah, God, what an ugly city Ilium is! 'Ah, God,' says Bokonon, 'what an ugly city every city is!' Sleet was falling through a motionless blanket of smog. It was early morning. I was riding in the Lincoln sedan of Dr. Asa Breed. I was vaguely ill, still a little drunk from the night before. Dr. Breed was driving. Tracks of a long-abandoned trolley system kept catching the wheels of his car. Breed was a pink old man, very prosperous, beautifully dressed. His manner was civilized, optimistic, capable. I, by contrast, felt bristly, diseased, cynical. I had spent the night with Sandra. My soul seemed as foul as smoke from burning cat fur.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Cat’s Cradle)
For instance, with "Ragtime" I was so desperate to write something, I was facing the wall of my study in my house in New Rochelle and so I started to write about the wall. That's the kind of day we sometimes have, as writers. Then I wrote about the house that was attached to the wall. It was built in 1906, you see, so I thought about the era and what Braodviw Avenue looked like then: trolley cars ran along the avenue down at the bottom of the hill; people wore white clothes in summer to stay cool. Teddy Roosevelt was president. One thing led to another and that's the way that book began: through desperation to those few images.... - 92nd Street YMHA Interview
E.L. Doctorow
Let’s see St. Louis.” “One of the most colorful sections of town is right here at the waterfront,” Julie Anne said. “We can ride a little old-fashioned trolley car. It will take us to a number of interesting places including the arch and the old-time paddle wheel steamers at the foot of the levee.” “That sounds like fun,” Nancy said eagerly. “Let’s try the arch first.” At the next corner the girls boarded a yellow streetcar which clanged its bell and rode off slowly and smoothly toward the huge arch in the waterfront park. They got out with several other tourists and followed them across a concrete walk. Then they went down a ramp toward the entrance into one leg of the huge span.
Carolyn Keene (The Message in the Hollow Oak (Nancy Drew, #12))
And when spring comes to the City people notice one another in the road; notice the strangers with whom they share aisles and tables and the space where intimate garments are laundered. going in and out, in and out the same door, they handle the handle; on trolleys and park benches they settle thighs on a seat in which hundreds have done it too. Copper coins dropped in the palm have been swallowed by children and tested by gypsies, but it’s still money and people smile at that. It’s the time of year when the City urges contradiction most, encouraging you to buy street food when you have no appetite at all; giving you a taste for a single room occupied by you alone as well as a craving to share it with someone you passed in the street. Really there is no contradiction—rather it’s a condition; the range of what an artful City can do. What can beat bricks warming up to the sun? The return of awnings. The removal of blankets from horses’ backs. Tar softens under the heel and the darkness under bridges changes from gloom to cooling shade. After a light rain, when the leaves have come, tree limbs are like wet fingers playing in woolly green hair. Motor cars become black jet boxes gliding behind hoodlights weakened by mist. On sidewalks turned to satin figures move shoulder first, the crowns of their heads angled shields against the light buckshot that the raindrops are. The faces of children glimpsed at windows appear to be crying, but it is the glass pane dripping that makes it seem so.
Toni Morrison (Jazz (Beloved Trilogy, #2))
selvage of gray-blue radiation from the kitchen tube fringed the bedroom door and mingled with a pale shaft of nocturnal Brooklyn, a compound derived from the halos of streetlights, the headlamps of trolleys and cars, the fires of the borough’s three active steel mills, and the shed luster of the island kingdom across the river, which came slanting in through a parting in the curtains.
Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay)
I make my way back whistling. Gerry nods towards Mrs Brady who is standing beside the trolleys. Morning, Mrs Brady, I say cheerfully. I push her provisions out to the car. Things are something terrible, she says. You can't trust anybody. No. It's come to a sorry pass. It has. There's hormones in the beef and tranquillizers in the bacon. There's men with breasts and women with mickeys. All from eating meat. Now. I steer a path between a crowd of people while she keeps step alongside. Can you believe it - they're feeding the pigs Valium. If you boil a bit of bacon you have to lie down afterwards. Dear oh dear. Yes, I nod. The thought of food makes me ill. The pigs are getting depressed in those sheds. If they get depressed they lose weight. So they tranquillize them. Where will it end? I don't know, Mrs Brady, I say. I begin filling the boot. That's why I started buying lamb. Then along came Chernobyl. Now you can't even have lamb stew or you'll light up at night! I swear. And when they've left you with nothing safe to eat, next thing they come along and tell you you can't live in your own house. I haven't heard of that one, Mrs Brady. Listen to me. She took my elbow. It could all happen that you're in your own house and the next thing is there's radiation bubbling under the floorboards. What? It comes right at you through the foundations. Watch the yogurts. Did you hear of that? No. I saw it in the Champion. Did you not see it in the Champion? I might have. No wonder we're not right. I brought the lid of the boot down. She sits into the car very decorously and snaps her bag open on her lap. She winds down the window and gives me 50p for myself and £1 for the trolley.
Dermot Healy (Sudden Times)
When I am away from Sandhill, sometimes the picture of it comes drifting toward me- just the picture of it, like some sunny little island I have got to get back to. And there's my family. Most of the time I seem to see them sort of like a bunch of picnickers in a nineteenth century painting, sitting around in the grass with their picnic baskets and their pretty dresses and parasols, and floating past on that island. I think, I've got to get back. I think, they need me there and I have got to get back to them. But when I go back, they laugh at me and rumple my hair and ask why I;m such a worrier. And I can't tell them why. There's nothing I can tell them. Pretty soon I leave again, on account of seeing myself so weak and speechless and worried. I get to thinking about something I just miss like hell in another town, like this tree on a street in Atlanta that has a real electric socket in it, right in the trunk, or the trolley cars in Philadelphia making that faraway lonesome sound as they pass down an empty street in the rain, through old torn-down slum buildings with nothing but a wallpapered sheet of brick and a set of stone steps left standing...
Anne Tyler (If Morning Ever Comes)
He came back from France when Tom and Daisy were still on their wedding trip, and made a miserable but irresistible journey to Louisville on the last of his army pay. He stayed there a week, walking the streets where their footsteps had clicked together through the November night and revisiting the out-of-the-way places to which they had driven in her white car. Just as Daisy's house had always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty. He left feeling that if he had searched harder he might have found her—that he was leaving her behind. The day-coach—he was penniless now—was hot. He went out to the open vestibule and sat down on a folding-chair, and the station slid away and the backs of unfamiliar buildings moved by. Then out into the spring fields, where a yellow trolley raced them for a minute with people in it who might once have seen the pale magic of her face along the casual street. The track curved and now it was going away from the sun which, as it sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
Michael saw Northampton Castle being built by Normans and their labourers, while being pulled down in accordance with the will of Charles the Second fifteen hundred years thereafter. A few centuries of grass and ruins coexisted with the bubbling growth and fluctuations of the railway station. 1920s porters, speeded up into a silent comedy, pushed luggage-laden trolleys through a Saxon hunting party. Women in ridiculously tiny skirts superimposed themselves unwittingly on Roundhead puritans, briefly becoming composites with fishnet tights and pikestaffs. Horses’ heads grew from the roofs of cars and all the while the castle was constructed and demolished, rising, falling, rising, falling, like a great grey lung of history that breathed crusades, saints, revolutions and electric trains.
Alan Moore (Jerusalem)
In Richmond, for instance, free blacks petitioned the city council to repeal the city’s repressive Black Code, and in New York City there was the stunning behavior of Elizabeth Jennings. On a Sunday morning in 1854 she was pulled out of a horse-drawn trolley car and wrestled to the ground by a white conductor and driver who sought to keep her from sitting in the white section. With the same conviction and audacity shown by the free blacks of Richmond, Jennings took her case to court. Her victory there broke the back of segregation on public conveyances in New York.
Robin D.G. Kelley (To Make Our World Anew: Volume I: A History of African Americans to 1880)
This was Alec Yarr, who, many years ago, used to pilot a Haddon Avenue trolley from Camden to Haddonfield. Now there are no cars. Buses have answered demands for speed, at the cost of fuming the air and filling it with squeals and droning sounds.
Henry Charlton Beck (More Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey)
Father was a strict disciplinarian to his children in their early years, but his attitude toward himself was truly Spartan. He never visited the theater, for instance, but sought his recreation in various spiritual practices and in reading the bhagavad gita. Shunning all luxuries, he would cling to one old pair of shoes until they were useless. His sons bought automobiles after they came into popular use, but Father was always content with the trolley car for his daily ride to the office. The accumulation of money for the sake of power was alien to his nature. Once, after organizing the Calcutta Urban Bank, he refused to benefit himself by holding any of its shares. He had simply wished to perform a civic duty in his spare time.
Paramahansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi)
driver’s side. Across the road a group of teenage lads are mucking about with a shopping trolley. Bashing it against someone’s wall. If Dad was here they wouldn’t dare. Not that he’s a hard nut or anything, certainly not any more. But he’s lived here all his life and knows too many people to be messed with. I look at them again and remember another of Dad’s favourite sayings. You don’t shit on your own doorstep. ‘Oi, sling your hooks,’ I call out to them. They look over, scowl at me, then slink off with the trolley. I smile to myself. I still get a little kick out of it sometimes. Being Vince Benson’s daughter. ‘Right, let’s go,’ I say, getting into the car and fastening my seat belt. ‘What did you say to the big boys?’ Ella asks. ‘I told them to go away.’ ‘Were they being naughty?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Where will they go now?’ ‘I don’t know. But at least they won’t be bothering people in Grandma’s street.’ I glance at Ella in the rear-view mirror. She nods, apparently satisfied with that, and picks up her Frozen sticker book from the back seat. * The car park is packed. I wonder whether to wait
Linda Green (While My Eyes Were Closed)
The journey to King’s Cross was very uneventful compared with Harry’s trip on the Knight Bus. The Ministry of Magic cars seemed almost ordinary, though Harry noticed that they could slide through gaps that Uncle Vernon’s new company car certainly couldn’t have managed. They reached King’s Cross with twenty minutes to spare; the Ministry drivers found them trolleys, unloaded their trunks, touched their hats in salute to Mr. Weasley, and drove away, somehow managing to jump to the head of an unmoving line at the traffic lights. Mr.
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter, #3))
Steve had tried to reach us after our Father’s Day phone call. There was no way I could have realized that, because I didn’t have any mobile phone reception at the cottage. He was back on Croc One and trying to get hold of us via satellite phone. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t be in range again until the next day. We enjoyed our dinner, built a huge fire, and snuggled down for the night. We didn’t hurry ourselves the next day. We meandered west, stopping at a raspberry farm and at the Honey Factory in Chudleigh. They featured a beehive behind glass, and we loved watching as the bees worked on their honeycomb. They never stopped to say, “I wonder what the meaning of life is.” They just kept building. The Honey Factory also featured a plethora of bee-themed products: bee gum boots, bee back massagers, bee umbrellas, and a bee trolley for the kids to ride on. Bindi sampled every single flavor of honey that they had. She bought a wristwatch with a bee on it. Robert picked out a backpack. “Robert,” I said, “that backpack is great. It has bees on it.” “It has one bee on it,” he said, correcting me. “Oh, okay, one bee,” I said, amused at my son’s seriousness. We spent the last hour of the morning at the Honey Factory. As we walked out the door, Bindi looked at her newly purchased watch and said, “It’s twelve o’clock.” We all stopped for a moment and considered that it was twelve o’clock. Then we got into the car and left.
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
trolley car ride.
James Patterson (Violets Are Blue (Alex Cross, #7))
I made a mental note of where I'd parked the car, but when I came out of the precinctI couldn't remember where it was. I pushed a full shopping trolley through acres of busy car park to try to find it, and after 20 minutes I was nearly in tears. Eventually I just stumbled across it, but I don't remember parking there at all. I felt so stupid. What's even worse was that a few weeks later I did exactly the same thing. - Fiona, 56
Caroline Carr (Menopause: The Guide for Real Women)
in a matinee this afternoon before we go sightseeing.” An hour later Sam parked on a side street in downtown Atlanta and opened Violet’s door. He led her to a colorful trolley car and helped her aboard, arm tight around her shoulders. The other passengers
Beth Duke (It All Comes Back to You)
During World War II trolley tracks ran down Central Avenue, the main street of the Jersey City Heights, before traveling off of the cliffs and continuing down to Hoboken on a high wooden trestle. At best, it was a hairy ride as it jostled around, nearly coming off of the rails. For some of us kids, it was exciting to hop onto the back of the trolley for a free ride, and then snap the cord to the electrical rod, which provided power from an overhead wire, when I wanted to get off. This would leave the conductor spewing a streak of profanity, as his trolley ground to a standstill. Departing the scene in haste, I would run and quickly disappear into the darkness, leaving him with the daunting task of getting the rod back onto the overhead wire in the dark.
Hank Bracker
In the 1970s, Mumbai (then Bombay) was a whirl of motion, noise and colour. A million kirana stores lined the streets (this hasn’t changed much), with honking Ambassador cars, trolley buses and autos jockeying with cycles for space on the narrow roads. There was music, art, literature. People with big ideas and hopes for the future. Then, as now, the city was a crucible for a young entrepreneur with a dream. As a boy, I soaked in every aspect of vibrant Mumbai like my life depended on it. Back then, India was much more a manufacturing and agricultural economy, and I paid special attention to the economics of business—how family businesses
Ronnie Screwvala (DREAM WITH YOUR EYES OPEN: AN ENTREPRENEURIAL JOURNEY)
So Clarke was in her Vauxhall Astra, on her way to the Royal Infirmary. The hospital sat on the southern edge of the city, plenty of space in the car park at this hour. She showed her ID at the Accident and Emergency desk and was shown where to go. She passed cubicle after cubicle, and if the curtains were closed, she popped her head around each. An old woman, her skin almost translucent, gave a beaming smile from her trolley. There were hopeful looks from others, too – patients and family members. A drunk youth, blood still dripping from his head, was being calmed by a couple of male nurses. A middle-aged woman was retching into a cardboard bowl. A teenage girl moaned softly and regularly, knees drawn up to her chest
Ian Rankin (Rather Be the Devil (Inspector Rebus, #21))
Then there are people who scatter trolleys here, there and everywhere in the car park because a short walk from their car to the front of the store is seemingly too much.
Kerry Wilkinson (A Face in the Crowd)
We are a store where you, as a mother, can find all the toys, clothes and accessories for maternity such as baby trolleys, car seats, cribs, beds and much more. There are no limits between your wishes and our stock, everything your children need to be comfortable and have fun can be found at Motheringo! The best of all is that regardless of the exact age of your baby, boy or girl, you will always find something ideal, at a good price and of excellent quality.
Motheringo
If the city is a man, a giant sprawled for miles on his back, rough contours of his body smothering the rolling landscape, the rivers and woods, hills and valleys, bumps and gullies, crushing with his weight, his shadow, all the life beneath him, a derelict in a terminal stupor, too exhausted, too wasted to move, rotting in the sun, then Cudjoe is deep within the giant's stomach, in a subway-surface car shuddering through stinking loops of gut, tunnels carved out of decaying flesh, a prisoner of rumbling innards that scream when trolleys pass over rails embedded in flesh.
John Edgar Wideman (Philadelphia Fire)
However, since the early 1930s, new-home construction had been somewhat stalled, first due to the economic effects of the Depression and then due to the war, a period when many homebuilders were contracted to meet emergency military housing needs. The lack of immediately available housing forced families to double up and, occasionally, to take more extreme measures. In 1947, two years after the war’s end, some 500,000 families were still occupying Quonset huts or other temporary housing. In Chicago, 250 families took up residence in former trolley cars that had been converted into living quarters. In Omaha, one newspaper advertisement declared: “Big Ice Box, 7x17 feet, could be fixed up to live in.
Eric Rutkow (American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation)
Nothing changed, in the aftermath of loss. Songs kept getting written. Books kept getting read. Wars didn’t stop. You saw a couple arguing by the trolleys at Tesco before getting in the car and slamming the door. Life renewed itself, over and over, without sympathy. Time surged on in its usual rhythms, those comings and goings, beginnings and ends, sensible progressions that fixed things in place, without a thought to the whistling in the woods on the outskirts of town. It began as a whistle, expelled from dry lips. Over the years it sharpened to a bright, continual note.
Emma Stonex (The Lamplighters)
Engineers working on self-driving cars have already begun to realize that the software is going to have to be programmed to solve certain kinds of trolley problems.
Sean Carroll (The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself)
Growing up outside of Philadelphia, I never wanted for diner food, whether it was from Bob's Diner in Roxborough or the Trolley Car Diner in Mount Airy. The food wasn't anything special- eggs and toast, meat loaf and gravy, the omnipresent glass case of pies- but I always found the food comforting and satisfying, served as it was in those old-fashioned, prefabricated stainless steel trolley cars. Whenever we would visit my mom's parents in Canterbury, New Jersey, we'd stop at the Claremont Diner in East Windsor on the way home, and I'd order a fat, fluffy slice of coconut cream pie, which I'd nibble on the whole car ride back to Philly. I'm not sure why I've always found diner food so comforting. Maybe it's the abundance of grease or the utter lack of pretense. Diner food is basic, stick-to-your-ribs fare- carbs, eggs, and meat, all cooked up in plenty of hot fat- served up in an environment dripping with kitsch and nostalgia. Where else are a jug of syrup and a bottomless cup of coffee de rigueur? The point of diner cuisine isn't to astound or impress; it's to fill you up cheaply with basic, down-home food. My menu, however, should astound and impress, which is why I've decided to take up some of the diner foods I remember from my youth and put my own twist on them. So far, this is what I've come up with: Sloe gin fizz cocktails/chocolate egg creams Grilled cheese squares: grappa-soaked grapes and Taleggio/ Asian pears and smoked Gouda "Eggs, Bacon, and Toast": crostini topped with wilted spinach, pancetta, poached egg, and chive pesto Smoky meat loaf with slow-roasted onions and prune ketchup Whipped celery root puree Braised green beans with fire-roasted tomatoes Mini root beer floats Triple coconut cream pie
Dana Bate (The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs)
Cities who do not have trams always look less literary, less poetic, and less mysterious!
Mehmet Murat ildan
All his family were miners: during the war even his grandmother had worked down the shafts, losing the fingers of her left hand under the wheels of a runaway trolley-car. Though he had gone into a white-collar union job after college, he still thought of himself as a miner, a shakhtyor – in Russian the word still has a faint heroic ring – too. But beyond that Alexey wasn’t too sure what he
Anna Reid (Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine)
Only a man off his trolley would consider riding around in a police car with Homicide. Homicide with psychic hunches.
Dorothy B. Hughes (In a Lonely Place)
Geryon had a trolley thing like of those kiddie trains that take you around zoos. It was painted black and white in a cowhide pattern. The drivers car had a set of longhorns stuck to the hood, and the horn sounded like a cowbell. I figured maybe this was how he tortured people. He embarrassed them to death riding around in the moo-mobile.
Rick Riordan
The Rosebud Diner in Somerville was a refurbished trolley car that smelled of strong coffee and burnt toast and employed only geriatric women with foul tempers.
Scott Von Doviak (Charlesgate Confidential)
In May 1901, Edison formed the Edison Storage Battery Company. Edison had big plans for his new battery, which he thought could be used by trolley companies and others. To extend the viability of his invention into the countryside, Edison even proposed that small windmills be attached to electrical generators. Together, they would be used to recharge batteries in cars while homeowners were asleep in a manner that would be cheaper than gasoline.25 This model of decentralized household distributed energy plus electric car is being revisited today in the Honda House of the Future on the University of California, Davis, campus, again raising the prospect that we lost what could have been an opportunity to do things differently one hundred years ago.
Amy Myers Jaffe (Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security (Center on Global Energy Policy Series))
the Touring Club, offering a prize for the best electric car, it occurred to me that I might put my battery into an auto, and win.” “Hum,” remarked Mr. Swift musingly. “I don’t take much stock in electric autos, Tom. Gasolene seems to be the best, or perhaps steam, generated by gasolene. I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. All the electric runabouts I ever saw, while they were very nice cars, didn’t seem able to go so very fast, or very far.” “That’s true, but it’s because they didn’t have the right kind of a battery. You know an electric locomotive can make pretty good speed, Dad. Over a hundred miles an hour in tests.” “Yes, but they don’t run by storage batteries. They have a third rail, and powerful motors,” and Mr. Swift looked quizzically at his son. He loved to argue with him, for he said it made Tom think, and often the two would thus thresh out some knotty point of an invention, to the interests of both. “Of course, Dad, there is a good deal of theory in what I’m thinking of,” the lad admitted. “But it does seem to me that if you put the right kind of a battery into an automobile, it could scoot along pretty lively. Look what speed a trolley car can make.” “Yes, Tom, but there again they get their power from an overhead wire.” “Some of them don’t. There’s a new storage battery been invented by a New Jersey man, which does as well as the third rail or the overhead wire. It was after reading about his battery that I thought of a plan for mine. It isn’t anything like his; perhaps not as good in some ways, but, for what I want, it is better in some respects, I think. For one thing it can be recharged very quickly.” “Now Tom, look here,” said Mr. Swift earnestly, laying aside his papers, and coming over to where his son sat. “You know I never interfere with your inventions. In fact, the more you think of the better I like it.
Victor Appleton (Tom Swift #5: Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout: The Speediest Car on the Road)
About how far do you expect your car will go with one charging of the battery?” “Well, if I can make it do three hundred miles I’ll be satisfied, but I’m going to try for four hundred.” “What will you do when your battery runs out?” “Recharge it.” “Suppose you’re not near a charging station?” “Well, Dad, of course those are some of the details I’ve got to work out. I’m planning a register gauge now, that will give warning about fifty miles before the battery is run down. That will leave me a margin to work on. And I’m going to have it fixed so I can take current from any trolley line, as well as from a regular charging station. My battery will be capable of being recharged very quickly, or, in case of need, I can take out the old cells and put in new ones.
Victor Appleton (Tom Swift #5: Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout: The Speediest Car on the Road)