Trolley in His Backyard : Streetcar Man Has 1-Track Mind

Raymond Younghans is a man with a desire named streetcars.

It has been that way ever since Younghans, 63, was a child. Fascinated by the sights and sounds of the streetcars, he would entertain his fancy by drawing crayon pictures of the “Big Red Cars” and “Yellow Cars” of Los Angeles.

He displays a picture that he said he drew in 1935 that shows a smiling conductor with a green cap at the wheel of a bright orange street car (he didn’t have a red crayon) on the Beverly Hills/South Pasadena line.

“I sat for hours drawing,” Younghans said. “That’s all I had to do.”

Chronicle of an Era

These days, Younghans sits for hours every day in his home in northeast Los Angeles sifting through and organizing what has snowballed from crayon drawings into what he calls “a paper blizzard” of documents, photographs and memorabilia that chronicle the era of the Pacific Electric Railway and Los Angeles Railway streetcar companies.

Or he goes out to a backyard shed to dust off his vintage 1920 trolley car. It’s the only “car” Younghans has ever owned. He never bothered to get a driver’s license and still relies on public transportation.

His collection has nearly outgrown the modest four-room house in Cypress Park that his father built in 1922, not far from the Southern Pacific freight yards on San Fernando Road.

Younghans figures that he has invested a few thousand dollars in his collection, which, he said, has never been appraised. But he spent a lifetime taking photographs and foraging in scrap yards and trash bins to salvage a bit of Los Angeles history.

Something for History

And now there is a chance that it could someday be the showpiece of a museum that the curator of El Pueblo de Los Angeles State Historic Park would like to see opened in the Old Plaza.

“We think it’s the finest collection available,” said Jean Bruce Poole, El Pueblo’s senior curator. “It’s pure gold.”

Younghans said that much of his collection--corporate documents, real estate deeds, land leases, maps, diagrams and blueprints--was dug out of trash cans at the Pacific Electric terminal downtown, which he continued to haunt years after the Big Red Cars stopped running in 1961. (The Big Yellow Cars disappeared in 1963.)

“I was there one afternoon when they were dumping files and I kept going back for months until they told me to stop,” Younghans said.

Besides the electric railway company records, the house is filled with bags stuffed with old tickets, tokens, transfers and timetables. Scattered about are various streetcar parts, including brass fittings, headlights, seats, destination signs and electric power cables.

Object of His Pride

In the backyard, covered by overgrown bushes, sits a wood-frame signal tower that, he said, he bought for $15. Next to that is the pride of Younghans’ collection: his 28-foot-long, Yellow Car trolley.

The streetcar, which, he said, made its last run on the morning of June 30, 1946, was given to him by a friend in 1956. The friend acquired it from a salvage yard owner who had planned to use it for scrap metal.

Before he died, the friend gave the car to Younghans, and it was hauled to Cypress Park from Pasadena on a flatbed truck. A crane lifted the four-ton car into the yard, where he built the shed around it, Younghans said. There, car No. 1030 has sat for nearly 30 years, its destination sign reading “Out of Service.”

Younghans talks about his trolley with the same affection many others lavish on their automobiles, even though--with peeling paint, missing seats, broken windows and torn blinds--it is badly in need of restoration. Part of the roof is missing as the result of a 1978 fire.

Not Many Left

“There aren’t too many people with trolley cars in their backyard,” said Dave Cameron, president of the Electric Railway Historical Assn. of California. “Most of those people who had them have donated them to museums.”

El Pueblo’s Poole said that the possibility of transforming the Old Plaza substation on Olvera Street into a museum is being studied, but no decisions have yet been made. The substation once housed equipment used to convert electrical power from AC to DC for use by the streetcar system.

Declared unsafe because of its unreinforced masonry, the building is closed to the public and is used only for storage, Poole said. The $1.3 million needed to restore the substation still must be raised, Poole said, and she is eager to procure Younghans’ collection.

“What is so wonderful about it is its entirety, its totalness,” she said. “He has something of everything. We do so terribly want to get it.”

Younghans has met with Poole and said he is not averse to donating his trolley and some other items to El Pueblo, although he would like his collection to be spread around to several archives and museums.

Passion of His Life

From 1953 until his retirement in 1984, Younghans worked as a yard switchman for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. He never married because pursuing his passion for streetcars “has taken up a lot of my time.”

Younghans’ fondest memories, he said, go back before World War II, when he would get together with friends and travel the streets of Los Angeles like a modern-day cruiser on a nocturnal joy ride. The El Monte/Baldwin Park line was a favorite, he said, because there were few traffic signals to slow down the cars, which zipped along at 65 m.p.h.

“For a dime you could ride a long ways,” he recalls. “If I didn’t have anything else to do, that was a pretty snazzy diversion . . . the action, the sound.”

Younghans is saddened by the glut of automobiles and buses clogging the streets today. “It was quite a sight to see a three-car line going down a hill,” he said. “All it is now is streams of buses and dirty, stinking automobiles.

“The bus system was going to be the salvation of Los Angeles. Just look at it now; it’s stop-and-go traffic.”