Overview
The map shows Louisville's street railway system from the first horsecar line in 1864 to the last streetcar on Derby Day, 1 May 1948, plus the interurbans that ran out to Jeffersontown, Okolona, Prospect, La Grange, Shelbyville and across the river to Indiana. Every line has a date range, a path and, where we could find one, a reason it was built. Those three things come from different sources and carry different levels of certainty, and each line's panel on the map says which applies.
In short: the dates are well sourced, the reasons are partly documented, and the paths are the least certain. Most paths follow today's streets between documented points; some follow track traced from a 1906 map. Nothing here is a survey of where the rails actually lay.
Sources
Dates and route names
- Kentucky Transportation Cabinet / AECOM, Historic Context of the Interurban Railroad in Jefferson County, Kentucky (2021). Its Table B-1 lists 77 streetcar routes, 1864–1948, with start year, end year and car barn; Table B-2 gives month-level open and close dates for the Louisville & Interurban lines. The tables draw on Biemer, Calvert & Yater, Louisville's Street Railways (2018). We transcribed both tables by hand from the PDF and checked every year against the PDF's text layer. PDF · Table B-1 (CSV) · Table B-2 (CSV)
- ChicagoRailfan.com, Louisville pages. Day-level conversion and abandonment dates from 1930 on, car barn histories and a redrawn trackage map. Route history · Car barns · Trackage map
Paths
- OpenStreetMap street and rail centerlines (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL), used as the routing network for lines drawn on today's streets, and as surviving track for commuter railroads.
- Four historic city maps, aligned to today's streets (details below). The 1906 Mendenhall map's red "Electric Railways" were traced into a track network; the others are used to check and correct paths and are shown as overlays.
- Documented end points. 37 turnarounds (loops, turntables, stub ends) and interurban stations, from historical markers, National Register nominations, the KYTC report and the Pewee Valley Historical Society. Lines end at these wherever one is known.
Reasons, events and places
- The Why this line? notes, timeline events, landmarks and station histories were compiled from the KYTC report, ChicagoRailfan, Louisville Public Media, the Filson Historical Society, Kentucky historical markers, Wikipedia (as a pointer to sources) and local history sites. Each note is marked Documented (a source states it) or Inferred (a reasonable reading, not stated anywhere).
- Corrections from readers, including the Bardstown Road line by Patrick Piuma of the Urban Design Studio.
Used only as a cross-check
- Jake Berman's Louisville 1906 diagram (Lost Subways), a copyrighted schematic used to check which lines existed in 1906; nothing was traced from it.
How the lines were drawn
Each line uses one of four methods. The table says which for every line.
Today's streets Routed along modern streets
Most lines are written as a list of intersections taken from the route's name and documented end points (for example "South 4th Street & Central Avenue", then the Churchill Downs loop). A script finds each intersection in OpenStreetMap and follows the named street between them (a shortest path that strongly prefers the street named in both intersections).
Assumes the line used today's version of the street. Where streets have been renamed (Walnut is now Muhammad Ali Blvd, Green is Liberty, Avery is Cardinal Blvd) the modern name is used.
1906 map track Traced from the 1906 Mendenhall map
The 1906 map prints every electric line in solid red. We separated the red ink from the scan, closed the gaps where black lettering crossed it, thinned it to center lines and converted those to coordinates using the same alignment as the map overlay. That produced about 150 km of track. Lines from the early electric era are routed along this traced track, so their paths are the 1906 map's, not today's streets.
Where a line's named streets run more than 250 m from any 1906 track (often a gap in the tracing rather than missing track), that stretch falls back to today's streets; the line's panel says how much.
Checked vs 1879 map Horsecar lines
Mule-era lines are routed on today's streets, then compared against the aligned 1879 Index Map, where street railroads appear as dash-dot lines down the middle of the street.
Stations + roads Interurbans on their own right-of-way
The interurbans to La Grange, Shelbyville, Prospect and Indiana ran partly on private right-of-way that isn't in any digital map. Each is pinned to its documented stations, turnarounds and termini (Anchorage, Pewee Valley, Camden, Buckner, Scott's Station, the Florida Heights shelter and others); between them it follows the parallel main road.
The exact right-of-way could be traced from the 1912 USGS map of Jefferson County.
Rules applied to every line
- Straight segments. Where today's road network has a gap (a vanished street, an interstate interchange, a rail-only bridge), a stretch is drawn straight if the road route would be more than 1.8 times the straight-line distance or doesn't exist. This covers the Big Four Bridge crossing, 46th St to White City and a few others.
- Turnarounds. Turnarounds whose location was only approximate are moved onto the end of the line that used them, and say so in their panel.
- Pedestrian blocks. Where a street is now pedestrian-only (Fourth Street Live), the line runs straight through.
- Repeated names. Routes that the KYTC table lists more than once (Sixth Street, Hancock Street, Chestnut & Barret) are separate lines with their own dates.
What the animation simplifies
- Cars per line are stylized (two per streetcar line, one per interurban), not historical frequencies.
- Mule cars become electric line by line, following the 1891 street railway map (reproduced by Broken Sidewalk), which marks electric and horse-car roads separately. Lines electric on that map switch in 1890 (Green Street, the first, in 1889). Lines partly electric switch in 1892, and lines still on horse cars switch in 1894, since KYTC says conversion was done “by the end of 1893”. The exception is Crescent Hill, the last mule line, which ran to 13 November 1901. Mule cars move at about a third of electric speed.
- Each line is drawn at its full length for its whole life; extensions and cutbacks within a route's dates aren't animated, except where they are separate entries in the KYTC table.
- Car icons use the livery of the preserved horsecar #102 for city cars; electric and interurban liveries are stylized.
Historic maps
Each scan was aligned to today's streets with control points: intersections that appear on both the old map and OpenStreetMap. Most use a projective fit (straight lines stay straight). The 1940 transit map is hand-drafted with uneven scale, so it uses a thin-plate spline that bends to every control point; its error is measured by leaving each point out and predicting it from the rest.
All lines
Known gaps
Routes in the KYTC table that are not on the map, because nothing we found says which streets they used:
The likeliest places to settle them are the Filson Historical Society's Louisville Transit Co. records (route maps in package 28; franchises and rights-of-way in packages 18 and 21–27; finding aid) and Biemer, Calvert & Yater's Louisville's Street Railways (2018), whose 14 folded maps were not available for this project.
Other known approximations
- Interurban paths between stations follow modern roads.
- For many routes, which streets connected the named ones (and where a route began and ended) is inferred; each line's panel says so.
- Landmark and some turnaround locations are approximate where marked.
- Commuter railroads are drawn on surviving track; the Daisy Line's riverfront elevated, the L&N approach to First Street Station and the Big Four approach are hand-drawn.
Downloads
The files the map is built from. GeoJSON coordinates are WGS84 longitude/latitude.