In  this column by Arch Merrill he reminisces about old modes of transportation.

I wish I could get better copies of the pictures but these are the best available.

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‘We Went in Different Kinds of Vehicles’

By Arch Merrill

Originally published: June 10, 1951

GENE FOWLER, in bis autobiography. “A Solo in Tom-Tomas,” not a new book but a good one, tells how when he was a young lad, be once watched an uncle gazing out a window for a long time.

The old man did not move nor did he speak and his eyes seemed to be on something far beyond the familiar landscape before him.

Then the boy asked has Granny this question: “What do old men think about when they look off and don’t talk?”

And his wise old Granny replied “They think of things that will never come again”

There are so many “things that will never come again”—for those of us with gray in our hair. Those things are symbols of a vanished time when life was more tranquil and pleasures were simpler and we did not go so far as we do today—and we went in different kinds of vehicles.

Nothing brings back those yesterdays more vividly then old pictures. Some of them tell of the “good old Summertimes” of steam trains and horse-drawn and open trolleys.

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IT WAS A GREAT day in 1889 when the first steam train chugged over the 3½ miles of narrow gauge track of the Rochester & Glen Haven Railroad from the East Main St. station to Glen Haven on Irondequoit Bay.

Pictures were taken of the event, for Rochester was picture-conscious even then. The year before George Eastman had put his first Kodak on the market. Civic and railroad dignitaries who made the maiden trip posed proudly with the crew beside the two-car train. Many of them wore derbies, two or three of them straw sailor hats. Many also wore walrus mustaches and heavy gold watch chains.

The accompanying 62-year-old picture (top right) is from the collection of Harold Craig of Alexander, a railroader who Is interested in the lore of the Iron Horse.

Glen Haven was a lively resort in those days and the same interests that opened the rail line also built a big hotel with roomy porches under the hill. The first year the Glen Haven Railroad carried nearly 116,000 passengers. But that same year the first electric car whined along Lake Ave. from the city line to Charlotte, heralding a new era in transportation. The Glen Haven line bowed to that interloper in 1896 when it was electrified. It was junked in 1929, a casualty of the motor bus. No 40 years in history bad seen such transportation changes. The big Glen Haven hotel burned in 1928. Now the old resort under the willows is pretty quiet. It is haunted by the memories of “things that will never come again.”

* * *

IT STILL WAS she horse and buggy time in the first years of the new century and on pleasant summer days Dad and his cronies would chip in and charter a tally-ho from:Higgins 49″ or one of the other liveries and go down to the bay or the lake or some sporting event in style, behind four horses.

Tally-hos conveyed ball players from their hotel to old Culver Field in University Ave. sad return. Some of the big vehicles held nearly 30 passengers. One belonging to Higgins’ livery, said to have bean the world’s largest, had a capacity of 52.

The accompanying picture of one of those equipages was taken around 1903 in front of the New Osburn House (now the Milner) in South Ave. The old picture was lent by Albert P. Smith Jr. of 5128 St Paul Blvd., and his late father, a Spanish War veteran, is the man on the front seat in the straw hat nearest the camera.

There came a day when there were no more tally-hos and no more liveries. Thanks to the horseless carriage, they belong to “the things that will never come again,” along with buttoned shoes and peek-a-boo shirt waists, along with the hammock in the front yard and the hanging lamp in the parlor, along with Dad’s individual shaving mug in the rack down at the barber shop, along with Mother’s rocking chair on the wide front porch, along with such songs as “Arrah Wanna” and “Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider” and such catch phrases as “23 Skidoo” sod “You’re Not the Only Pebble on the Beach.”

* * *

ONCE upon a time the open trolley cars carried throngs to the beaches and to she old Bay St. hall park. The trolleys did not have coin fare boxes as those days and the conductor would reach up and pull a card to register the nickles he collected—or at least SOME of them. If the ear was crowded, he would have to walk along the running hoards on the side to take up fares.

“The Trolley Song” hadn’t been written then but homeward hound passengers would sing such tweet old refrains ts “Shine On. Harvest Moon” and The Moon Shines Tonight on Pretty Red Wing, the breezes sighing, the night birds crying.”

It has been many a year since an open trolley clattered over a Rochester street. A decade has gone by since the last trolley of any kind, save on the subway, rang its farewell gong. No motor bus, no matter how swift or how flexible in traffic, has—for old timers—the appeal of the old open trolleys of blissful memory.

“What do old men think about when they look off and don’t talk?”

“They think of things that will never come again.”