Washington's Last Streetcar Bridge Is Held Up by Vines

Nothing has crossed the Foundry Branch Trestle since 1960. Metro owns it, never ran a train over it, and in 2026 it was cleared for demolition.

Show Notes

In 2019, engineers checked what was still holding up DC's last streetcar bridge. Their answer wasn't the steel.

Full story, photos and sources: https://ghostsofdc.org/2026/10/20/foundry-branch-trestle-last-streetcar-bridge/

Narrated by an AI version of Tom's voice. AI also helps research and write the scripts; facts are checked against the original sources, and Tom reviews the episodes.

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The lost and untold stories of Washington, DC. The buildings, blocks and people the city and region forgot.

The Beatles played their first American concert here. Sharks turned up in the Potomac in 1911. Ford’s Theatre collapsed in 1893 while government clerks worked inside.

Since 2012, Ghosts of DC has been digging through old newspapers, maps and archives for stories like these, from Georgetown to Anacostia and across the whole DMV. Now they’re a podcast.

Short episodes, most around ten minutes. Each one is built on the historical record and tied to a full post with photos and sources at ghostsofdc.org.

Something for the Metro ride or the walk to work.

Narrated with an AI version of Tom’s voice. AI also helps with the archival research, and facts are checked against the original sources.

DC's Last Streetcar Bridge Is Held Up by Vines
Ghosts of DC

If you've driven Canal Road out of Georgetown, you've probably seen it through the trees. A rusted steel bridge, hanging over the woods in Glover-Archbold Park, wrapped in vines.

It's the last streetcar bridge in DC.

Nothing has crossed it since nineteen sixty. In twenty nineteen, engineers checked what was still holding it up.

Their answer wasn't the steel.

In July of twenty twenty-six, the Park Service signed off on tearing it down. So how did a trolley bridge outlive its trolleys by sixty-six years? And how did it end up belonging to Metro, which never ran a train over it?

Welcome to Ghosts of DC.

I'm Tom. Or really, an AI version of my voice. Since twenty twelve, I've been bringing this city's buried stories back to the surface, and this one's been hiding in the woods the whole time.

It comes from nine sources, from an eighteen ninety-five newspaper report to the Park Service's twenty twenty-six agreement. They're all on the post at ghostsofdc.org.

It starts in July of eighteen ninety-two, when Congress chartered the Washington and Great Falls Electric Railway. The plan was a trolley from Georgetown, out along the Potomac bluffs, toward Great Falls. It got as far as Cabin John, Maryland.

First, the railway needed land. And some of the land it needed belonged to a university.

In July of eighteen ninety-five, a judge ordered several landowners to show why their property shouldn't be taken for the railway. One of them was Georgetown College.

The college lost.

In eighteen ninety-six, a trestle went up across the deep valley of Foundry Branch, just west of the college. The railway wasn't really about the ride. It was about real estate.

Developers were already selling lots in the Palisades, on the promise of a short electric ride into the city.

It worked. By nineteen hundred, the company told Congress it had carried more than one point eight million passengers that year. That's a lot of people crossing a lot of trestles.

The line was famous for its scenery. It was also a little terrifying.

In August of eighteen ninety-nine, the Evening Star sent a writer who signed herself Pauline Pry to ride the suburban trolley lines. Her take on the Great Falls line is the best description of these trestles we've found.

Here's how she put it.

The beauty of the scenery is unsurpassed, but to be conscious of it you want to be utterly indifferent to life.

You crash along, now hugging the edge of a high, oozing mud embankment skirting the canal, now pounding over a wooden trestle forty or sixty feet above the ground, nothing but a worm-eaten rail between you and destruction if the car leaves the track.

The motorman, meanwhile, is visiting with some friends sitting beside him.

She wasn't exaggerating. The same day's paper reported that a man named J. E. Nelson was out and about again.

Earlier that week, he'd fallen through the first trestle out from Georgetown.

The bridge in the woods today is steel, not wood. Exactly when the steel went in, we haven't pinned down. Either way, for the next six decades it carried people out to Glen Echo Park, on what became the number twenty streetcar.

Then the city decided it was done with streetcars.

Capital Transit lost its franchise in nineteen fifty-five, after a seven-week transit strike. The new company, D.C. Transit, had orders to get rid of the streetcars. The Glen Echo line closed in nineteen sixty. The rails came up. The cars went away.

The bridge stayed.

DC's last streetcars ran in January of nineteen sixty-two. The city wouldn't have trains again until Metro opened in nineteen seventy-six.

Today, the Foundry Branch trestle belongs to Metro.

Metro never ran a single train over it.

It came out of a long legal fight over D.C. Transit's fare overcharges. In nineteen ninety-seven, a federal appeals court ordered the assets of restitution trust funds handed over to Metro. The trestle, and the land under it, came along with them.

By then, the bridge had been sitting unused since nineteen sixty. Nobody painted it. Nobody fixed it. And the woods grew up through it.

Metro had it studied in twenty fourteen and found it structurally unsound. Two years later, the trail underneath was closed. Then came the twenty nineteen inspection. The steel truss itself was in decent shape. The steel towers holding it up were not.

At the main supports, the engineers wrote, vegetation growing within the steel section is providing the only means of support.

The vines were holding up the bridge.

People tried to save it. In twenty eighteen, DC's Historic Preservation Review Board recommended against Metro's application to tear it down. Neighbors in the Palisades, Foxhall Village and Georgetown wanted a walking and biking bridge. In twenty twenty, the city's transportation department said no to fixing it, citing the cost. Then the case went back and forth in the courts for about three years.

In twenty twenty-three, Georgetown students and neighbors formed a coalition, and the DC Council set aside two hundred fifty thousand dollars to plan the bridge's future.

The next budget took all of it back.

In July of twenty twenty-six, the Park Service finalized the agreement to take it down. The superintendent of Rock Creek Park called removal the only responsible path forward to protect visitors. Before it comes down, it gets a formal portrait: large-format photographs and a short history. The low concrete footers stay, to mark where it stood.

When we made this, in October of twenty twenty-six, no demolition date had been announced. The trail underneath is supposed to reopen. And the bridge that opened up the Palisades will be gone.

If you want to see it, look up from Canal Road. While the vines still have it.

That's the story of the Foundry Branch trestle. Appreciate you listening. There are a lot more stories like this one at ghostsofdc.org.

We do this to bring back the lost and untold stories of Washington. This has been Ghosts of DC.