I’d like to think that an LRT from St. Albert to Edmonton is a given for sometime in the not too distant future. Someday, St. Albert is going to have to come to terms with the never ending and always increasing amount of traffic on the St. Albert Trail so getting the project on the books and mapping out an appropriate route for it makes sense to me.
After all, St. Albert had rapid transit more than 100 years ago and, contrary to Ms. Hughes statement that “It failed,” the Interurban railway ran extremely successfully. It took Raymond Brutinelle, a French expatriate, two years to finally get the little railway operating. Initially the single car made the trip back and forth to Edmonton’s north side three times a day weekly and twice on Saturdays. When Edmonton completed its northern streetcar line to the Interurban depot, ridership increased, calling for five trips daily plus two evening trips to accommodate movie goers.
During my early work with the Historical Society, I talked to people who had ridden the Interurban Railway, as both adults and children. Kids saw it as fun, an adventure, but I’m sure their parents looked at it as a remarkable timesaver and fully modern convenience.
And so it was for about seven months. We did not lose the little railway because it “failed.” Far from it. Brutinelle had already ordered a second car and was considering expanding. It was a fire at the car barns in April 1914, which destroyed not only the barns but also the trolley car, causing more than $30,000 damage, only partially covered by insurance.
This, plus a slowdown in the economy and the onslaught of the First World War, spelled the demise of our little rapid transit system. Mr. Brutinelle chose to return to France to fight with his countrymen in the upcoming battles and did not return.
Only conjecture is possible when considering how our whole “rapid transit” system and our reaction to it might have differed today had that fire not have happened and the First World War did not take our enthusiastic entrepreneur back to his homeland.
And just in passing, I fail to see how self-driving cars are going to eliminate the problem. It doesn’t matter whether the cars travelling the trail are driven by their owners or by themselves – the highways can only carry so many of them. And we should be thinking about that now.
Arlene Borgstede, St. Albert
