Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - Pittsburgh Light Rail - Free Zone Full Tour (2021)

The Pittsburgh Light Rail (commonly known as The T) is a 26.2-mile (42.2 km) light rail system in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and surrounding suburbs. It operates as a deep-level subway in Downtown Pittsburgh, but runs mostly at-grade in the suburbs south of the city. The system is largely linear in a north-south direction, with one terminus just north of Pittsburgh's central business district and two termini in the South Hills. The system is owned and operated by the Port Authority of Allegheny County. It is the successor system to the streetcar network formerly operated by Pittsburgh Railways, the oldest portions of which date to 1903. The Pittsburgh light rail lines are vestigial from the city's streetcar days, and is one of only three light rail systems in the United States that continues to use the Pennsylvania Trolley (broad) gauge rail on its lines instead of 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge. Pittsburgh is one of the few North American cities that have continued to operate light rail systems in an uninterrupted evolution from the first-generation streetcar era, along with Boston, Cleveland, New Orleans, Newark, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Toronto.

In the early 1960s, Pittsburgh had the largest surviving streetcar system in the United States, with the privately owned Pittsburgh Railways Company operating more than 600 PCC cars on 41 routes. In 1964 the system was acquired by the Port Authority of Allegheny County (PAT), which rapidly converted most routes to buses. By the early 1970s, only a handful of streetcar routes remained, most of which used the Mt. Washington Transit Tunnel just south of the Monongahela River to reach the South Hills area.

At that time, Port Authority planners were determined to scrap the rail system entirely in favor of busways (now called "BRT" for "Bus Rapid Transit") and an automated guideway transit system developed by Westinghouse Electric called Skybus. Community opposition rallied against the plan and in favor of retaining the electric rail trolley system and upgrading it into modern LRT. In the end, the LRT option was adopted for the South Hills suburbs, along with development of a busway ("BRT") system for the eastern and western suburbs.

0:00 Wood Street Station
1:56 Steel Plaza Station
2:17 First Avenue Station
7:19 Steel Plaza Station
7:57 Wood Street Station
8:35 Gateway Station
9:15 North Side Station
10:29 Allegheny Station
13:46 First Avenue Station
15:04 Mount Washington Transit Tunnel
15:56 Pittsburgh Light Rail Crossing the Panhandle Bridge
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