Ghost Rails of the Belmont Streetcar Line
by Paula Bosse
Matilda & Richmond, April, 2018… (photo: Dan Parr)
by Paula Bosse
I grew up on Ellsworth, between Greenville Avenue and Matilda — just south of Mockingbird, just north of the M Streets. When I was a child, Matilda was only partially paved — in my neighborhood, maybe only from Mockingbird down to Kenwood? Otherwise, it was a dirt street (!) — and this was in the ’70s! Right around Kenwood was a weird mound which might not have looked like much to an adult, but to a child it was pretty strange. I can’t remember if the rails were visible — I’m pretty sure they were.
That line was the Belmont Line, which ended (began?) at Mockingbird (I think there was a later extension of sorts, but I think Mockingbird was the end of the line for streetcar passengers). As a kid, I knew that Matilda had been a long-gone streetcar line, but never having seen a streetcar outside of a movie, I couldn’t really imagine what it must have been like to have streetcars (and an interurban! — more on that below) moving up and down a street which was less than a block from my house.
A few years ago I stumbled across the YouTube video below and was surprised to see actual footage of that streetcar rolling up Matilda. The first five minutes of the video contains 16mm footage (both black-and-white and color) shot around Dallas in 1953 and 1954 by Gene Schmidt. It’s GREAT! You’ll see streetcars-galore moving past all sorts of familiar and vaguely familiar sights around the city, from Oak Cliff to downtown to way out to Mockingbird and Matilda. It ends with the Belmont-Seventh car (car 603) pulling to the end of the line — the view is looking south down an unpaved Matilda Street from Mockingbird, with a glimpse of the Stonewall Jackson playing field at the left, on the other side of the fence. (The Matilda footage begins at 4:17.)
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Matilda, south from Mockingbird, ca. 1954 (Gene Schmidt)
Above, a screen capture from the video showing Matilda looking south from just south of Mockingbird. Stonewall Jackson Elementary School is at the left. Today the view looks like this.
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Before the streetcar arrived, Matilda was the artery that led the Texas Traction Company’s Sherman/Denison interurban into Dallas. This electric interurban service from the north, which closely followed the H&TC railroad line, arrived in Dallas in 1908, back when the official entry-point into the Dallas city limits was just off Matilda, near Greenville Avenue and Bryan Street.
DMN, Jan. 16, 1908 (click to read)
The interurban route connecting Sherman/Denison with Dallas opened on July 1, 1908 and lasted for 40 years, until its final run on December 31, 1948. (Read the Dallas Morning News article on the 1908 inaugural trip for big-wigs, “Many Make Trip Over Interurban,” July 1, 1908, here. Below is the accompanying photo. Image that running up and down Matilda — and, later, along other streets in Dallas — several times a day!)
DMN, July 1, 1908
Dallas’ ever-increasing population began to move northward and eastward, necessitating public transportation which would connect these developing areas with the rest of the city. One of the early “suburban” lines was the Belmont Line, which branched off the Bryan Street line and served the Belmont Addition and beyond; it opened in 1913, but these early days appear to have been more of a private “dinky” service (see SMU’s dinky car on the beyond-the-city-limits tracks at Hillcrest and McFarlin, here). The Belmont line — as well as the Vickery Place and Mount Auburn lines — became part of the city’s official streetcar system in 1922.
Before the dinky service, riders were able to get on and off the large interurban cars at stops between Mockingbird and the area around Bryan and Greenville Ave. Even though interurbans and streetcars were able to travel on the same rails, it took years for dedicated streetcar tracks to be laid along Matilda.
This detail of a real estate ad shows that the Belmont line had reached at least as far as Richmond by 1914 (I felt I had to include this because the finger is pointing at the exact location of the exposed rails in the photo at the top!):
May, 1914 (detail from Lakewood Heights real estate ad — see full ad here)
By 1922 the Belmont line had extended north to Velasco; by 1925 it had gotten to McCommas; by 1936 it had made it up to Penrose; and by 1939 it had finally reached Mockingbird (in time for the opening that year of Stonewall Jackson Elementary School, located at Mockingbird and Matilda).
Dallas streetcars began to be phased out in 1955, and the Belmont line was one of the first to go — its last run was March 6, 1955: “The Belmont-Seventh streetcar line will go out of existence Sunday to be replaced by service with new Diesel buses” (Dallas Morning News, March 6, 1955). The new bus route in the Lower Greenville area would, for the most part, be along Greenville Avenue, one block west of unpaved Matilda Street.
In March, 1955, it was reported that the abandoned Belmont-Seventh streetcar tracks were deeded to the city by the Dallas Railway and Terminal Co., with the understanding that they would eventually be paved over. The tracks were on Matilda, Bryan, Cantegral, Live Oak, St. Paul, King’s Highway, Edgefield, Seventh, Bishop, and Colorado. In April, 1956, it was reported that the City Council had approved the sale of the streetcar viaduct over the Trinity River and the Matilda street right-of-way.
But what about that paving of Matilda? Mrs. K. E. Slaughter had thoughts on the matter in a letter-to-the editor in April, 1955:
Since removal of the Belmont streetcar line in part — Matilda and Bryan streets — would it not be advantageous to develop this section into an important use to the heavy automobile traffic? Matilda now is no more than useless tracks built up between a cow path. (DMN, April 7, 1955)
“Cow path” — ha!
Another annoyed News reader wrote in 1963 — eight years after the tracks had been abandoned — about the useless unpaved thoroughfare:
The abandoned almost-private right of ways, such as Matilda, nearly two miles south from Mockingbird, received by the city in a deal to permit an all-bus operation, have not yet been paved or otherwise improved. (DMN, Oct. 21, 1963)
I’m not sure when that paving finally happened — early ’70s? — I think it must have been done in stages. I don’t remember a time when the stretch between Mockingbird and Kenwood wasn’t paved, but I do remember Matilda being a dirt road south of Kenwood. I don’t have a good recollection of the year, but kids remember all sorts of weird things, and those mysterious mounds were pretty memorable. (UPDATE: See photos of Matilda being paved at Goodwin in 1971 here.) I wish I’d known what an interurban was when I was a child. That would have made my neighborhood seem a whole lot more interesting! Heck, it used to the Gateway to Sherman!
I’ve long despaired of having missed the streetcar age. But it’s nice to know that one ran so close to the house I grew up in.
End of the line, ca. 1954… (Gene Schmidt)
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Sources & Notes
Top photo taken by Dan Parr on April 15, 2018; it was originally posted to the Facebook group Dallas History Guild and is used here with permission. (Thanks, Dan!) The photo was taken at Matilda and Richmond, looking south on Matilda. See it on Google Street View, here. (Roadwork along Matilda is awful at the moment, but much-needed. Apparently it is being reduced to three lanes for automobiles with two bike lanes being added — read about it in the Lakewood Advocate, here.)
YouTube video shot by Gene Schmidt in 1953 and 1954; the direct link is here.
Another interesting video on YouTube was made by the City of Allen and contains period footage of the interurban that served North Texas. It’s a breezy 6-and-a-half minutes, and it includes some cool shots of Dallas.
If you want to see a whole bunch of North Texas interurban photos, check out this great 83-page PDF compiled by DART, “History of the Interurban Railway System and Monroe Shops,” here.
Speaking of DART, they posted a cool 1925 map of streetcar and interurban lines, here — click the map to see a larger image. (In 1925, the Belmont line ended on Matilda at McCommas).
ALSO extremely cool is a Google map showing Dallas’ Historical Streetcar (and Interurban) Lines laid over a present-day Google map, here. Zoom in and out. Very useful!
eBay
1940, eBay
1954, eBay
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Copyright © 2018 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Flashback : Dallas 
I’d like to think that only someone who learned to drive with an early ’50s Buick could really appreciate the one wallowing through a right turn at 4:15. This is major nostalgia!
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What a great article bringing back my memories of Matilda not fully paved when I was growing up in the 1950’s. I grew up just four blocks west of Matilda and it was something we crossed quite often during the summer months riding our bikes over to Tietze Park. Thanks for the memories!
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In addition to thanking Paula for her enlightened interest in old Dallas stuff we should also remember people like Gene Schmidt for having taken the effort and expense to record sights and sounds that most reasonable people of that older time would likely have regarded as a pretty odd way to spend one’s time.
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So, I wasn’t crazy! I remembered Matilda not being paved south of a certain point, and here is confirmation. I don’t think we ever walked that far south as my group of kids walked to school. At any rate, it was not yet paved by the spring of 1970 as that was the last time I went to Stonewall.
If you look closely at the Google Map you can see the right of way still exists in the old plats even north of the MKT because Google somehow shows the platting pattern. Also look how much greater the setbacks from Matilda are than from the parallel streets like Delmar or Concho.
It’s also worth noting that there’s still the raised berm on the south side of the MKT that carried the streetcar (or interurban) tracks across the MKT (now DART).
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I’m amazed by your ability to track down and present all of the information you do in your posts.
Anyway, I read your posts with interest, as I’ve developed an interest in D/FW history in the last few years. What makes it so bittersweet is how so much of this has disappeared in the last twenty years. Even in the late 90’s, you could drive down Lemmon and Greenville ave and see history from the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s still intact. Now even buildings from the 70’s (when I was in grade school) are being razed. Dallas is destroying its own history, and becoming painfully homogeneous. What was once a really interesting and unique city is becoming a soporific exercise in consumerism.
Soon, the only record we’ll have of what it was once like are pages such as yours, and those Flickr pages of people like Mark Carroll, Scott Dorn, Red Oak KId and SouthEast Dallas Photographer.
Thanks for your great work.
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Thanks. Yeah — sadly, it’s probably happening everywhere. You don’t really appreciate what’s been lost until you’re old enough to remember what it used to be like. I will forever lament the loss of McKinney Avenue.
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McKinney Ave is gone? Holy cow! I had no idea.
My perspective on Dallas (and Fort Worth to some extent) is informed by having had to live in Atlanta, Ga for some years
do to my wife’s job. As much as I disliked living there, they do a pretty good job of preserving their history. They didn’t seem as hell bent on mowing everything down with the belief that it led to greater profits, or what ever the motive was/is.
Dallas, and Fort Worth to a somewhat lesser extent, could learn a lot from the city of Atlanta it would appear. Won’t happen, and that’s a shame.
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I see, you mean the loss of what was once there. Got it.
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If you haven’t been to Dallas in a while, you would never recognize what McKinney Ave. looks like these days.
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I have. Quite regularly. I didn’t ever frequent McKinney much that I can recall, so I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, unless there’s a lot of the new taste in architecture on display. I’m more familiar with what Greennville and Lemmon had been like.
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[…] couple of days ago I wrote about the history of Matilda Street in regard to its role as a railway for the Sherman-Denison interurban and the Belmont streetcar […]
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[…] streetcars and a whole lot of information on the Belmont line can be found in the post “Ghost Rails of the Belmont Streetcar Line.” (Source: home-movie shot by Gene Schmidt, […]
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[…] “GHOST RAILS OF THE BELMONT STREETCAR LINE” […]
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[…] those tracks but didn’t know what they had been used for — I wrote about those tracks here and here). The land had been part of the vast Caruth land […]
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If you guys lived on Ellsworth, you may remember Hogan’s Pizza on the southeast corner of Mockingbird and Greenville circa 1968. There was a strip shopping center there then. There was also a donut shop right next door. I want to say it was Ingram’s, but probably not. You can tell where I spent much of my life fifty years ago!
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The earliest memory I have of the southeast corner of Mockingbird and Greenville is Kip’s. My family went to Kip’s fairly often — I loved that place! We also patronized Lone Star Donuts in the weekends, and, of course, Piggly Wiggly.
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Yes, Kip’s. We were there a lot! Two Big Boy’s was my intake at the time! But Hogan’s Pizza (in the strip shopping center just east of Kip’s) was so good, that I NEVER even went into Campisi’s just one block away to the west (where it still is.) Of course, the Dr. Pepper bottling plant was “caddy-corner” from Kip’s then and there was a drive-in car wash just to the east of the Dr. Pepper facility across Greenville. I used that car wash a lot in the 70s. That block of Lovers and Greenville (orbiting around Kip’s) was my haunt when we first moved to Dallas in 1962.
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