Phoenix Street Railway
former streetcar service
The Phoenix Street Railway provided streetcar service in Phoenix, Arizona, United States, from 1888 to 1948. The motto was "Ride a Mile and Smile the While."
History
The line was founded in 1887 by Moses Hazeltine Sherman and used horse-drawn cars. The system opened on January 11, 1888. Many of these lines were built to subdivisions that were being developed by Sherman's land development interests. Beginning in 1893, electric streetcars were slowly introduced to the system. All of the lines provided fully electric service by 1895, with the exception of the Grand Avenue Line which did not receive electric service until 1909. The service was popular with the locals and was partly responsible for the growth patterns observed in the early history of Phoenix. In 1911, the first of several planned interurban lines opened to Glendale; additional lines were planned but never built to Tempe, Mesa, and Scottsdale. The system reached its height in the 1920s with several line extensions. By 1925, there were 33.6 miles (54.1 km) of track on six lines.
“Phoenix Street Railway” enters the record as former streetcar service. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Phoenix, Street and Railway can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Phoenix Street Railway” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Phoenix, Street and Railway provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7186993. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1888, 1948, 1887 and 1893.
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This entry incorporates text from “Phoenix Street Railway” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.