High Water - Pittsburgh, PA

This card, showing high water in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is probably from the March 1907 flood.
The report below from the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette is courtesy of  the GenDisasters website:


PITTSBURG, March 15.—Flood losses in Allegheny county are summarized as follows:

Loss in output of steel mills, $3,000,000; loss in output of other industries, $2,000,000; loss in wages of employees, $1,837,000, estimated damage to industrial plants, $2,500,000; total, $9,337,000.


With the rapid receding of the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio rivers which is taking place tonight conditions are fast assuming normal proportions and the most destructive flood in the history of the city is at an end. At nightfall the approaches to the bridges were clear of water and several hours later street car service was resumed.


Thousands of suburbanites who have been stranded in this city since yesterday were able to reach their homes while the downtown section, which has been crowded with sightseers, is almost deserted. The only indications of the flood in the downtown section tonight are the many pipes across the sidewalks through which water is being pumped from submerged basements. In several districts power plants have been repaired and candles, used for thirty-six hours, have been replaced with electric lights.


At 9 o’clock to-night the rivers had fallen almost eight feet. At that hour the stage was twenty-nine feet, and dropping a half foot an hour.


Immediately following the subsiding of the water the task of repairing the damage was begun. A majority of the employees of the large manufacturing establishments who were temporarily thrown out of employment are endeavoring to put the plants in working order and by Monday most of these will have resumed operations.


Railway service is being restored but local train schedules have been revised, allowing each train more time. This action was taken owing to the fear that the roadbeds may have been weakened by the water. In some instances sections of tracks have been washed away and a number of railroad bridges outside of Pittsburg were damaged.


Excitement was caused to-day by several fires. One which swept the Mt. Washington district had to be dynamited on account of a shortage of water in the mains. The loss is about $225,000.


The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, Fort Wayne, IN 16 Mar 1907

Palm Beach, Florida

The message sent to Ralph Jillson in 1945 reads:

This is where you should come and what a good time you would have swimming every day.

(illegible name)

Streetcar Sunday - Leipzig, Germany

The emphasis of this postcard is obviously the City Hall, not the streetcar, but if you look off to the left there it is.  Another thing I noticed about this card is that the people who tinted the German and Dutch cards tended to make small but very stylized and distinctive clouds. The American ones often have a bank of clouds. Do you care? Probably not, but if you look at enough postcards you start to notice these things.

The streetcar system in Leipzig, Germany developed in a similar fashion to other systems around the world. The Leipzig trams, or streetcars, started out in 1872 as horse-drawn cars, with service provided by the Leipziger Pferdeeisenbahn (Leipzig Horse railway.) The company was enormously successful and eventually owned 1,013 horses and 172 cars.  Life was good until the competition came along.

That's another commonality with other systems around the world. Today, public transit is typically provided by a jurisdiction or by a single entity. There is rarely competition or duplication between systems. But in the early days of the streetcar, there were often multiple service providers, even in small towns. This in turn led to some systems going under and also consolidations. In the case of Leipzig, the new competitor came along in the 1800s and started developing an electric tramway system. This action spurred the horse-car railway folks to convert to electric power too. The last horse-drawn car service operated in 1897.

After World War I, the systems were replaced by a publicly-operated system, which eventually also operated buses and trolleybuses. Many streetcar segments were damaged or closed for other reasons during World War II. The closures continued after the war, although the antiquated streetcar system operated continuously. A real resurgence in streetcar development in Leipzig didn't take place until the 1980s, when a number of new segments were opened. You can see a detailed history of the Leipzig streetcar system here. You can also visit this site to see what the current system looks like.