The recent development of light rail transit in the Twin Cities has been an undeniable success. Plans for additional lines progress, and our ways of shopping, dining, and commuting are changing dramatically. As we embrace riding the new Hiawatha light rail line, an older era comes to mind--the age when everyone rode the more than 500 miles of track that crisscrossed the Twin Cities.

In Twin Cities by Trolley, John Diers and Aaron Isaacs offer a rolling snapshot of Minneapolis and St. Paul from the 1880s to the 1950s, when the streetcar system shaped the growth and...

St. Paul Union Depot was among the busiest and best-known places in the city--one of the largest depots in the nation and St. Paul's link to the world. It had nine platforms, twenty-one tracks, and well over 140 trains coming and going each day. At its peak in the 1920s, the Union Depot processed more than twenty million pieces of mail each year. Construction of the new depot began in 1917, among the burned remains of the previous depot, and was finally finished in 1926 as both a monument to St. Paul's urban growth and its gateway to the Northwest.

Practical rather than...