Streetcars Across America: An Analysis of the Growth and Decline of Electric Urban Railways in the United States from Directory Data

Abstract

This thesis report describes the extraction of records from the McGraw Electric Railway Manuals to rectify the lack of documentation around streetcar systems through technological means, and discusses the appropriateness of using technology to analyse century-old directories. The extracted records are analysed on a metropolitan, state and national level, and fitted to logarithmic S-curve models to describe their growth and decline.