Brill Co. trolleys traveled the world
Philadelphia boasts the largest trolley network in the United States, serving more than 31 million passengers a year on 68 miles of track. As SEPTA plans a $700 million upgrade, consider the John G. Brill Co., one of the largest manufacturers of streetcars in the world.
Philadelphia boasts the largest trolley network in the United States, serving more than 31 million passengers a year on 68 miles of track. As SEPTA plans a $700 million upgrade, consider the John G. Brill Co., one of the largest manufacturers of streetcars in the world.
Brill's story began with the arrival in Philadelphia of a 30-year-old German immigrant, cabinetmaker Johann Georg Brill. After working at a local railroad car firm, Brill and his son struck out on their own. Americanizing their name, the pair founded the eponymous company in a rowhouse at 31st and Chestnut Streets in 1868-69.
Many of Brill's initial designs were for horse- or mule-drawn streetcars, with ungulates still the machine's motive force. With the electrification of streetcars, Brill presciently pivoted toward trolley manufacturing.
The company's reputation for quality and innovation soon traveled far beyond Philadelphia. Its first foreign sale in 1873, to Mexico, marked the beginning of Brill's global reach. At its zenith, the company manufactured more than one-third of the United States' trolley cars, and was one of the world's largest producers of undercarriages. The only continent without a Brill customer was Antarctica.
Salesmanship was not Brill's only asset; quality and innovation were what he was known for. The company, its engineers, and its employees held hundreds of patents on everything from signal bells and door-opening mechanisms to full car designs.
To accommodate demand, production was moved to 62nd and Woodlawn Avenue, employing more than a thousand skilled laborers. Brill manufactured more than 45,000 railroad cars, buses, and trolleys during its 70-plus-year history. Today the sprawling site is memorialized by a strip mall and illegal dumping.
By the middle of the 20th century, most American cities had focused their transportation systems around buses, a product Brill did not begin to manufacture until the 1940s. By 1944, the remaining Brill subsidiaries had been absorbed by larger companies not affiliated with the industry.
Philadelphia's history is intimately tied to trolleys, from the development of the city's "streetcar suburbs" to early civil rights protests led by William Still and Octavius Catto to allow African American riders. To those outside of Philadelphia in the early 20th century, the city's entrepreneurial spirit was marked more by Brill's streetcars than the brim of Stetson's hats.