The Rock Creek Railway, which operated independently from 1890 to 1895, was one of the first electric streetcar companies in Washington, D.C., and the first to extend into Maryland.
Created to increase the value of land owned by the Chevy Chase Land Company, the railroad began service in 1890. By 1893, it stretched more than seven miles from the Cardoza/Shaw neighborhood of D.C. to Chevy Chase Lake, Maryland. The trip from Chevy Chase to downtown took about 35 minutes.
In 1895, the railroad purchased the Washington and Georgetown Railroad Company and changed its name to the Capital Traction Company, which would become one of the two major streetcar companies that operated in and around Washington, D.C., in the early decades of the 20th century. The line fostered the development of several neighborhoods of northwest Washington, D.C., and suburban Maryland.
History
The Rock Creek Railway was founded by Francis Newlands as part of a plan to develop streetcar suburbs in northwestern D.C. and adjacent Maryland. He and his partners incorporated the company on June 23, 1888 (just four days after D.C.'s first electric trolley company, the Eckington and Soldiers' Home Railway). The railroad's officers were the same as the Chevy Chase Land Company's: Newlands, president; Edward J. Stellwagen, vice-president; Howard S. Nyman, secretary; Thomas M. Gale, treasurer, and A. J. Warner, manager.
In 1890, the railroad began operations on its first quarter-mile of track, connecting Connecticut Avenue NW and 18th Street NW along Florida Avenue (recently renamed from Boundary Street). Overhead trolley poles were forbidden in this part of the city, so the railroad used the Love conduit system between the rails to provide power to the cars. (These original tracks would be removed in 1899 as the city's streetcar network developed.)
Meanwhile, the railroad worked to extend its line toward the land that would become Chevy Chase, Maryland. Track was laid down the middle of Connecticut Avenue, which the Land Company was extending from the Rock Creek valley past the D.C.-Maryland line. A bridge was built to carry road and track across Klingle Ford Road.
But the major engineering work was bridging Rock Creek. The company hired the Edge Moor Iron Works to build an iron truss bridge at Cincinnati Street NW (now Calvert Street NW). The 775-foot, 1,226-ton bridge, whose six trusses sat on 125-foot-high iron trestles, was completed on July 21, 1891. (In 1911, the rickety bridge would be shored up by narrowing its roadway from 40 feet to 25 and adding timber cribbing, which would in 1922 be replaced by steel joints and asphalt surface. The bridge itself would be replaced in 1935 by the Duke Ellington Bridge; to minimize traffic disruption, the trestle was moved 80 feet downstream on rollers and kept in use until the new bridge was completed, whereupon it was demolished on December 17 of that year.) Per the terms of its charter, the railroad transferred both of its bridges to the city of Washington, D.C., on July 20, 1891.
On September 16, 1892, service opened on a six-mile extension of the line that made the Rock Creek Railway the first D.C.-based streetcar to reach Maryland. The tracks ran from the original terminus at U Street NW up 18th Street through the neighborhood today known as Adams Morgan, where it formed a junction with the Metropolitan Railroad at Columbia Road. Turning west along Erie Street (today's Calvert Street), the line crossed the Rock Creek bridge, then ran north-northwest along the recently graded extension of Connecticut Avenue NW north of Rock Creek. The line continued on Connecticut to the District line at Chevy Chase Circle, then on trackage built by Newlands' Chevy Chase Land Company to Chevy Chase Lake, Maryland.
The line ended just south of the grade crossing of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's Georgetown Branch at Connecticut Avenue. Here the Rock Creek built a terminus complex that included a small station and the railroad's six-track car barn. Coquelin Run, a small tributary of Rock Creek, was dammed to create a lake to supply water to the railroad's northern power house. This generating plant, which burned coal that arrived on a B&O siding, used the Thomson-Houston system installed by General Electric to deliver electricity to streetcars via overhead poles. The poles—ornamented iron within the city and a mile beyond, square post lumber for the remaining mile—drove streetcars all the way to 18th and U Streets.
Congress approved two proposed extensions on April 30, 1892. One was a northern spur to the National Zoo that was never built, but the authorization to lay track east along Florida Avenue to North Capital Street was eventually used.