Bruce Henstell Sunshine and Wealth: Los Angeles in the Twenties and Thirties, Chronicle: San Francisco, 1984, 132 pp. 1938, 1924, 1920s, 1919, 1915, 1912, 1890s,
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"The Pacific Electric. A visitor arriving in Los Angeles in the 1920s would have been immediately impressed by the size of the Pacific Electric, Southern California's streetcar system. Biggest in the world! some native was sure to boast, with 1,000 miles of track connecting cities from San Fernando to Balboa. In 1924, 109,650 passengers rode the rails. Via a PE Big Red Car or a Yellow Car of the Los Angeles Railway, which operated within L.A. city limits, it was only an hour from the surf at Santa Monica to downtown and another forty-five minutes to Pasadena. There was a subway, and there was Mt. Lowe, the magical incline railway behind Pasadena that lifted you up the sheer face of a mountain and then twisted around until you reached the summit and the Alpine Tavern. You could see clear to Catalina and everything in between.
"The native was sure to suggest to the tourist that the best and cheapest way to see Southern California was aboard a Big Red Car. There were 6,000 trains each day over 115 different routes, and the basic fare was five cents . . . Or the beach cities, Hollywood and Beverly Hills along the Balloon Route . . .
"In 1915, the president of the PE called Los Angeles an "electric railway paradise." It was. Graceful new cars glided over miles of unobstructed right of way, past spectacular scenery, delivering passengers in, as the company boasted on its logo, speed, safety, comfort. Yet, by 1920, for all its apparent health, the system had begun to die. Its death throes were spasmodic and ultimately irreversible.
"Los Angeles was growing up too fast. There were too many people to serve and they were taking up residence in places increasingly distant from the tracks the PE operated . . ." p. 23