Route 1 LRT Concept

Route 1

A Light Rail Transit service conceptualized by Jack W. Boorse

In 1985 Jack Boorse wrote and designed a proposal for a Philadelphia transit route that would resurrect the Fairmount Park Trolley and link it to Center City with a new Light Rail line composed largely of existing rights-of-way. It is not known how this proposal was disseminated, if at all.

This document, which is fully reproduced in a PDF which you may download here, was created using hand-drawn illustrations and typewritten text, and it consequently reflects the state of homemade publications before the advent of desktop publishing.

More importantly, the Route 1 booklet is a quintessential example of all the essential ingredients of Jack’s passion and profession:

It is nostalgic, yet forward-looking. In this respect Jack’s concept suggests a slight parity with Walt Disney when he created a revolutionary amusement park in 1955 that was built on exactly these two same pillars. Unlike Jack’s Route 1, Disneyland did initially not contain a public service aspect, although Walt Disney did later incorporate this component into his thinking when he developed the EPCOT concept in the 1960s. The Route 1 booklet offers the modest hint that Jack was partly a futurist and urban planner.
The booklet shows Jack’s preference for Light Rail above other forms of tracked transit. Interestingly, just three years after he created this booklet, Jack became a designer on the Baltimore Central Light Rail Line. He began doing for real what he had long done in paper form as a hobby.
Some of the materials used to create the document come from publications Jack collected and places he visited. His intention in collecting rail information throughout his life was to put it to use by writing books or influencing the development/improvement of transit systems. In this booklet he has done just that.
During his early days as a civil engineer, Jack became a skilled draftsman – a craft which was practiced quite differently in the days before the introduction of CADD. This work features not only the writing acumen Jack often exhibited, but his draftsmanship as well.
It is appropriate that this document advocates a Philadelphia transit project. Even though most of Jack’s consulting work as a transit designer took place in other cities, Philadelphia was his lifelong home. Philadelphia has often been lacking in transit initiatives, and nothing would have given Jack more pleasure than to be developing an entirely new system for his home town. Although it never occurred during his career at Parsons Brinckerhoff, Jack did envision this dream through the Route 1 booklet. At the time he developed this concept and crafted this booklet, Jack was the City of Philadelphia’s Chief Traffic Engineer.

This booklet is reproduced here as a memorial to Jack Boorse with the hope that his idea may someday still come to pass. Although the booklet is openly shared with this purpose in mind, it is requested that in the event any of its ideas, words or images are used in later works in any medium, appropriate credit is given to Jack Boorse.