The early morning blaze at Three Kings Public House that shut down a good chunk of the Loop to traffic yesterday will not delay the delay-prone Loop Trolley's return to Delmar.
Patti Beck, communications director at Bi-State Development, confirmed that the trolley — which the RFT previously dubbed "unkillable" — will roll along as planned at 11 a.m. this morning, kicking off its warm-weather relaunch.
The trolley will run on the same schedule as it did when it reopened last time in August. You can hop on any time you want so long as it's a Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday between 11 a.m. until 7 p.m. (and so long as you have a burning desire to visit the Missouri History Museum). And yes, unlike the bus service that so many St. Louisans depend upon, it’s free.
Yet its return has not been greeted with cheers. The old-timey streetcar connecting the Loop to the History Museum has given new meaning to the phrase "trolley problem" since it started service in 2018.
Early in the trolley's life it managed to regularly hit parked cars; in 2019 a car hit it, knocking it out of commission. Its tracks also proved dangerous to cyclists and to local businesses, which fled the route. (Many of the trolley's trials and tribulations were memorialized in a t-shirt that same year.) Bigger problems included a failure to get enough cars on the track to provide regular service and a complete lack of interest among riders.
In February 2022, Bi-State Development took control of the trolley, because if the region just let the streetcar die they risked having to give some of the feds' almost $50 million back. It sputtered along for a bit in the late summer and fall under Bi-State’s supervision before a planned winter hiatus.
When Bi-State announced the trolley's return last month, critics (OK, it was us …. those critics were pretty much just us) questioned the wisdom of continuing to prop up the project — which, again, had already cost almost $50 million in federal funds — while Bi-State slashed its Call-a-Ride service for disabled St. Louisans. In a sad irony, we noted that unlike the trolley, Call-a-Ride is being imperiled by excessive demand.
On Wednesday it seemed for a moment like the early morning three-alarm fire that started in the kitchen of Three Kings might imperil today's ride, proving yet another setback in a five-year history already full of them. And some trolley critics wondered whether the streetcar's wires may have somehow impeded fire trucks from battling the blaze.
University City Fire Department Chief Bill Hinson said there was no truth to those rumors.
"The Loop Trolley line wasn't too much of a problem. We know it's here. We train for it to be here," said Hinson. "The Loop Trolley we were able to work through."
Hinson added that one firefighter was injured fighting flames in the building when several trusses in the ceiling fell down on the first responder. Hinson described the injuries as minor and that the firefighter was "shook up, but okay."
The cause of the blaze is being investigated, but at this point there is no reason to expect foul play, Hinson says.
While the fire at Three Kings really has nothing to do with the trolley, it does further prove a sad fact: St. Louis is stuck with this thing, and neither parked cars nor wounded cyclists nor three-alarm blazes can offer us a reprieve.
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