US Standard Light Rail Vehicle
light Rail Vehicle
The US Standard Light Rail Vehicle (SLRV) was a light rail vehicle (LRV) built by Boeing Vertol in the 1970s. The Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA) of the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) promoted it as a standardized vehicle for U.S. cities. Part of a series of defense conversion projects in the waning days of the Vietnam War, the SLRV was seen as both a replacement for older PCC streetcars in many cities and a catalyst for cities to construct new light rail systems. The US SLRV was marketed as and is popularly known as the Boeing LRV and SLRV and should not be confused with their prior Lunar Roving Vehicles for NASA.
The SLRV was purchased by the public transportation operators of Boston and San Francisco. In service by 1976, the US SLRV proved to be unreliable and scrapping started as early as 1987, but the SLRVs were not completely replaced on both systems until 2007. Although the SLRV itself was not successful due to poor reliability, it did set the general size and configuration for succeeding LRVs in the United States.
History
Origin
The original concept of the SLRV came to fruition in the late 1960s as the limited number of cities with PCCs in North America were looking for modern replacements for their aging rolling stock; the last PCC had been manufactured in 1952. In 1968, the MBTA in Boston, one operator of PCC streetcars, created a mockup for one end of a proposed "Type 6" streetcar out of wood; the Type 6 program was discontinued after MBTA decided the cost to produce it was too high. Meanwhile, Muni in San Francisco, released a request for proposals in 1971 to purchase 78 new cars, designed by the rail transit engineering firm Louis T. Klauder and Associates (LTK), to replace their aging PCC fleet. The new cars, which Muni called subway-streetcars, were touted as "specially designed for San Francisco, adaptable to both subway and surface conditions and seating more passengers than the present [PCC] streetcars." Muni received two bids in November 1971, with a low bid price of US$473,000 (equivalent to $3,760,000 in 2025) per car from Boeing.
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