About ten years ago, Spokane was eager to jump on the LRT bandwagon. After some failed ballot initiatives, it appears electric transit has become the preferred alternative, albeit rubber tire variety.

If Spokane is successful in implementing its proposed electric trolleybus line, then it will become the sixth U. S. city to add this mode to its transit fleet. Current cities with electric trolleybuses in service are:

Boston (Cambridge, actually, since the 3 ETB lines operate out of Harvard Square).
Dayton
Philadelphia
San Francisco
Seattle

Sloan

Link is PDF. You may need Adobe to open.

http://www.spokanetransit.com/files/conten...ty_Overview.pdf

King County Metro is going to be replacing the current fleet in a few years, would be great if they could do a joint order, with either Spokane or Dayton, or both. It depends on many factors though, especially the exact timing.

I suspect the buses woul be hybrids using CNG or flywheels to allow off-wire operation.

What would be cool, and a first for modern U.S. ETB operation, would be an interstate route (Spokane-Coeur d'Alene, ID). A bi-state compact could make it happen and trigger federal grant money.

I suspect such an operation would stimulate economic development, particularly tourism. Back in the 1920s, interurbans from Spokane brought scads of vacationers to a boat dock on a lake in Coeur d'Alene.

Back to the future!

Sloan

Has a trolleybus route ever been tried that far before? One of the reasons we had the Breda Dual Mode buses for the tunnel was because of the cost it would have been to have strung the trolleywire all the way to places like Auburn and Federal Way(and I doubt the wire would be great on an Interstate).

I am not sure if the STA has any routes that get close to the Idaho line. The closest point I remember they got when I was going to EWU, was the Liberty Lake Park and Ride. Although the trolleybus plan is mainly for the core of the City of Spokane, they at least have a bus route that serves Liberty Lake all day, the 98-Liberty Lake via Sprague Ave. When I was going to EWU, this wa sonly served via an express route on I-90. Although the STA lost a good oppurtunity to have an excuse to serve the Idaho Line when Washington State Lottery did not have Powerball and Idaho did. Definitely would have had a good ridership when the jackpot was high.

As for Interstate Transit between Kootenai County, Idaho and Spokane, WA, I was often thinking of some kind of Diesel Powered Light Railway, if there were still a branchline to Cour d'Lane that had not been abandoned yet, but I doubt that could be possible today. I don't know if the state government in Boise would be of much help. Couer d'Lane only had a bus operation start in 2005.

CityLINK

"Has a trolleybus route ever been tried that far before?"

I don't know, but the longest electric trolleybus route in the world is 54 miles in Ukraine.

http://www.blacksea-crimea.com/Places/trolleybuses.html

Sloan

That would probably do it then, plus perhaps a dual-mode would work great. Borrow a little from the way the Puget Sound Electric Railway between Seattle and Tacoma ran their interurban. It ran on overhead trolleywire on the Seattle and Tacoma streetcar networks, but when it got out into the Auburn/Kent Valley, the pole dropped and the third rail engaged.

One of the reasons Seattle Transit dieselized half the trolley routes in 1963 was they were extending service into an 80-block area that the city had recently annexed. Rather than add the infrastructure for the trolleybuses(plus nobody was making new ones at the time), they chose to convert the existing routes to diesels. I always wondered, if it were not for the different voltages the tunnel buses used vs. surface trolleys, Metro could have just electrified the 71,72,and 73 routes, and extended service back into areas the old trollleys used to run.