Downtown El Paso still hums with a rhythm all its own, a mixture of mariachi, Spanish radio, and the dry rustle of wind against stucco. But there’s another sound too—a faint bell, a shimmer of nostalgia, and the low electric whirr of something gliding along the tracks. I didn’t get to ride the streetcar this time. I only saw it from the sidewalk, a blur of retro colors and polished chrome sliding past murals and pawn shops. Yet even from that brief glimpse, it pulled at something deeper than convenience or transit. It stirred history.
The El Paso streetcars look like they’ve stepped straight out of a postcard from the 1950s. Creamy bodies lined with turquoise and red, windows that wrap around like the brow of a hopeful robot from the Atomic Age. They are not replicas. They are restorations—resurrected from the bones of the very same PCC streetcars that once ran this route from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Cars that were sold off, sent to storage, and then brought home half a century later like prodigal sons of the borderland.
Once, these streetcars were more than transportation—they were the connective tissue of two nations. El Paso and Ciudad Juárez shared a single transit system. In 1902, the first electric streetcars began their international service. By the 1920s, they were part of daily life. One fare could carry you across the Rio Grande, across borders real and imagined. Workers, families, students, soldiers—they rode the rails from their homes in Juárez to their jobs in Texas and back again. In an age before border walls and passport checkpoints, the clanging of the streetcar bell was the music of a shared city.
By the late 1960s, though, the song was fading. Cars clogged the roads. Suburbs pulled people outward. The streetcars, once symbols of progress, became quaint relics in a world sprinting toward asphalt and air-conditioning. In 1974, service stopped. The cars were sold or stored, the tracks paved over, the border hardened.
But the past is persistent here.
In 2018, El Paso did something remarkable. The city dug up the past—literally. It found and brought back six of those original PCC streetcars, sent them to a specialist in Pennsylvania, and had them rebuilt from the chassis up. They now run along a 4.8-mile loop, through downtown and up toward the University of Texas at El Paso, crossing over some of the same rails their wheels once knew.
They do not go to Juárez anymore. That part of the journey has been lost to time, to politics, to policy. But their very existence whispers what used to be. They are a promise made visible: that the memory of a shared city hasn’t completely vanished. That a border once traversed daily by streetcar may still, in some quiet way, be traversed again—by history, by memory, by the very idea that connection is still possible.
As I stood and watched one roll past, I imagined what it would be like to ride—how the view would change with each block, how the sun would hit the glass at just the right angle to conjure the ghost of a simpler, if not easier, time. I didn’t get to ride a streetcar this trip. But I did get to remember them. And sometimes, that's the more powerful journey.