Perhaps the best way to tell the 40-year story of Kansas City’s interurban railways is to start at the end of the line.

On July 9, 1940, the final day of the Strang Line interurban’s passenger service, the last run evolved into a riot on the rails.

Early in the evening, a souvenir-seeking passenger had tried to abscond with a seat cushion by throwing it out a window and getting off at the next stop to retrieve it. Motorman Jimmy Collins would have none of it. “One of those souvenir guys, huh? Well, I’ll take that cushion if you don’t mind.”

Hours later, a red Strang Line car, with 82 passengers crammed into 55 seats, departed from Ninth and Main streets in downtown Kansas City en route to Olathe for what was supposed to be the start of the line’s last-ever round trip. By the time the car arrived in Olathe, riders had broken windows, torn up seats and destroyed fixtures.

It was so bad that police boarded the railway car at 19th and Main to tell passengers to quiet down. Then Thomas “Cap” Riley, who had been a key figure for the Strang Line since its inception in 1906, canceled the final return trip to downtown.

That riotous run in 1940 was the swan song for the wide-ranging and somewhat perilous interurban system in Kansas City, all other area lines having already folded. Remnants of the interurbans’ heyday dot the local landscape, but their origins likely are a mystery to most people.

Reader Margie Timmons-Maasen wanted to know more. Her query to “What’s Your KCQ?,” The Star’s ongoing series with the Kansas City Public Library that answers readers’ questions about our region:

Please tell me all about the interurban railroad running up into Platte County and on to St Jo. The Winnwood route went on to Excelsior didn’t it?

The interurbans — so named because, unlike city streetcars, they carried passenger beyond urban areas — had cheaper fares than regular railroads with more frequent runs, and they almost always operated on electricity rather than coal.

The line to which Timmons-Maasen referred, the Kansas City, Clay County & St. Joseph Railway, operated routes to St. Joseph and Excelsior Springs. But, as the tale of the Strang Line’s demise illustrates, there was much more to Kansas City’s interurbans.

They transported people to and from dozens of destinations. In fact, as we celebrate the expansion of our city’s 21st century streetcar line to nearly six miles — woo-hoo — it’s worth noting that the area’s independently operated, non-taxpayer-supported interurbans rode at least 200 miles of rails.

But it wasn’t the first.

By 1914, the area boasted eight interurbans operating 297 cars a day, according to a June 6, 1970, story in The Star. Some lines evidently operated only briefly because other histories place the number at five or six.

The interurbans, rolling beneath a single wire strung above the tracks, were typically single cars (the KCCC&SJ line, which carried thousands of people each weekend to Winnwood Beach in Clay County, sometimes had multiple cars linked together). They used the same basic technology as trolleys and streetcars in the cities, but the cars were larger, faster and featured more creature comforts. “A Splendid Ride” indicated one-way fares ranged from 25 cents to $1.55.

Walter Deitchman, who had been a regular on the KCCC&SJ, told The Star in 1996: “That line was so popular, sometimes you had to fight to get a seat. But it was worth it. … It was a thrill to ride.”

The KCCC&SJ is credited (along with the opening of the ASB Bridge in 1911) with much of the growth north of the Missouri River, and the Strang Line essentially created Overland Park.

In fact, William B. Strang Jr. is considered the founder of Overland Park. He designed the Strang Line (with no bridges or culverts) to pass his real estate developments, among them Overland Park. He also built an aviation park at the end of the line that drew thousands to see the new-fangled flying contraptions in the years before World War I.

“There were only two houses in Overland Park when we built that line out there,” said Riley, who was Strang’s right-hand man and then his successor.

For many rural residents, the interurban was a lifeline to the big city.

In 2002, Delbert Crabtree of Platte City related memories more than 80 years old to The Star.

“I’d ride into Kansas City at Eighth and Grand where they had those nickel hamburgers, and I could eat three or four of them,” he said. “Up on the corner, they had a drugstore with 11-cent cigarettes.”

Crabtree, then 94, also described how folks in the KCCC&SJ’s early days drove buggies to the Sharp’s Station store, where they hitched them in back of the store.

As alluring as a tranquil trip through the countryside sounds, the interurbans also produced a good deal of congestion — to say nothing of carnage.

After the KCCC&SJ began operating into and out of downtown Kansas City, where multiple lines used the same tracks, The Star reported on May 16, 1913, that mayhem ensued, with long delays and near accidents.

“With the 17 St. Joseph trolley cars added to the other 34 interurban cars and seven Metropolitan lines, all of which stop or turn at 13th and Walnut streets, that narrow crossing was almost a continual blockade yesterday.”

The situation was even more dangerous elsewhere on the interurban lines.

Livestock were at particular risk, but humans were frequent victims as well. That’s not surprising given the rudimentary railroad crossing warning systems of the day and the lack of any centralized railway traffic control system.

The KCCC&SJ distributed greeting cards to customers in 1915 listing its safety statistics and boasting that of more than a million passengers that year only nine were injured. Of course, those statistics didn’t account for non-passenger injuries and deaths resulting from accidents — the greeting cards noted there were 13 collisions with livestock and 23 with automobiles and other vehicles.

That was a supposedly safe year. For just one interurban line.

Then there were the many fires and robberies (after one, the culprits were found with $587, mostly in nickels, dimes and quarters).

One notable fire, caused by a short circuit on May 17, 1939, left a Strange Line car spewing flames in downtown Kansas City. Passenger Lula Zeiger of Hardy, Arkansas, told The Star: “I don’t know whether I like these big city things or not. Nothing like this ever happened to me down in Hardy.”

How much could a 35-year-old commercial contract lawyer from New York possibly know about the Kansas City area’s interurban rail system of nearly 100 years ago?

Quite a bit, as it turns out.

Jake Berman’s hobby is designing maps of big-city rail, streetcar, subway and interurban systems (along with diagram art relating to “Star Wars,” “Lord of the Rings,” Pokemon and more), which he sells at his Fifty-Three Studio website. He plans to turn the maps into a book called “The Lost Subways of North America.”

They include most major U.S. cities, with Kansas City being one of his more recent works.

“My grandmother is a proud alum of KU and KU Med School way back in the Stone Age,” Berman said. “So she would have taken the interurban from Lawrence to KC, for instance. … So Kansas City, it’s my grandmother’s connection.”

Berman’s Kansas City map highlights the interurban system as it existed in 1924.

“It took, I want to say, about two months to put this together because what I was trying to do was assemble all these things from original sources,” Berman said. “So all of the stuff was put together based on the original timetables.”

Berman said sales of the 18-by-24-inch Kansas City interurban poster have been “OK. It’s been beer money, put it that way.”

When Kansas City International Airport was in its planning stages and infancy, there was talk of a rapid-transit system from there to downtown that would follow part of the railbed of the old KCCC&SJ.

The new rapid-transit system turned out to be a pipe dream, but the railbed hasn’t gone anywhere.

Remnants of abandoned interurban railbed are scattered about, some of which have been converted to hiking/walking trails such as the Line Creek Trail in Platte County and the Interurban Trail in Riverside.

A few old bridges also have survived in the Northland, including one at the Martha-Lafite Thompson Nature Sanctuary in Liberty and another just north of Avondale.

Buildings that housed interurban stations also exist, notably in Overland Park, where the former Strang Line depot at 80th Street and Santa Fe housed a home-decorating store for decades before the Overland Park Historical Society took it over in 2019. Downtown Overland Park also is the site of the Strang Line’s old car barn (now a furniture store). Nearby stands a statue of Strang.

S.E. Peck witnessed the start and finish of the Kansas City, Leavenworth & Western. He watched one of the final cars roll past his filling station in Bethel the day the line ceased operations in April 1938.

“I saw the first one leave,” Peck, 82, told The Star at the time. “It’s like the passing of an old friend to me. When I came here in ’72, there were Indians camped hereabouts, and the thought of a trip to Leavenworth in an hour and a half was as fantastic as the plan for one-day service to Europe now.”