A Streetcar Named Tortoise

Mexico City's 600,000 straphangers were elated last week when 41 new streamlined U.S. streetcars appeared on the trolley lines. With their usual facility for nicknames, they labeled the new cars clorofilos, for their light green color, and crowded aboard for test runs. The clorofilos were the first new cars placed in operation in more than a generation. Most of the city's 403 remaining streetcars are almost 50 years old. Many adult passengers have been riding the same cars all their lives, just as their fathers had before them. The ancient cars, a faded yellow and top-heavy, are so slow that passengers call them tortugas (tortoises).

Once, though few of the present-day passengers would believe it, the tortugas ran on a fast, split-second schedule; but that was the era of spit-and-polish British management, and it did not last long. The revolutions of 1914-18 came along, and rival generals commandeered the cars for use as troop transports, armored units or mobile-gun platforms. The equipment came out of the wars beat up and battle-scarred. By that time, buslines, paralleling the trolley routes, were cutting profits so drastically that the private owners of the trolley system could not afford to replace worn-out rolling stock. Worse yet, they were forced to entrust the battered cars to reckless motormen, who trundled them through the city like juggernauts. As a result, accidents were frequent.

But no matter how much damage they did, the motormen were protected by their labor contract; the company was bound to pay for their defense. As a result, streetcar crewmen were ordered out of uniform and into civilian clothes so that they could hastily mingle with the crowd and disappear in case of an accident. When they turned themselves in to the cops a few days later, they always had bail money and an amparo (injunction) for a quick release. The crewmen went back to work, and the accident cases usually dragged on to cheap settlements.

Last week, as passengers by the thousands crowded the new streetcars to bounce on the spring-cushioned seats and enjoy the smooth, gliding ride, only a few oldtimers sighed for the cumbersome elegance of the tortugas in their heyday. Then the streetcars were used for fashionable funerals, and the wife of Dictator Porfirio Diaz had her own private streetcar, furnished with silk curtains, revolving osier seats, spittoons and magazine racks.

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