United Streetcar
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| Private (subsidiary of Oregon Iron Works) | |
| Industry | Transportation |
| Founded | 2005 |
| Defunct | 2015 |
| Headquarters | Clackamas, Oregon, United States |
| Products | Streetcars (trams) |
| Website | www.unitedstreetcar.com |
United Streetcar, LLC, was an American manufacturer of modern streetcars, located in the Clackamas area in the southeastern suburbs of Portland, Oregon, founded in 2005. It was the only U.S. company building modern streetcars—as distinct from light rail cars or new replicas of historic streetcars—until 2013, when Brookville received its first order for a modern (as opposed to faux historic) streetcar, for the Dallas Streetcar.
United Streetcar was a limited liability company and was a wholly owned subsidiary of Oregon Iron Works, Inc. (OIW), which has been in business since 1944. It was originally reported to have been established in early 2007, after OIW was the successful bidder for a contract to construct a prototype streetcar for the city of Portland, but in 2010 the company clarified that it had been formed in December 2005. The company completed its first streetcar in 2009. It was dissolved in February 2015.
Oregon Iron Works, a specialized manufacturer of complex structural components and systems, began considering entering the field of streetcar manufacturing in 2004, after realizing that the Portland Streetcar system had purchased vehicles built only by foreign manufacturers, possibly due to the absence of any U.S.-based manufacturers of modern streetcars.
In 2005, Congress approved a federal transportation spending bill which included a US$4 million grant to TriMet for the acquisition, on behalf of the city of Portland, of a prototype domestically manufactured streetcar. With a goal of fostering the domestic production of modern streetcars, the grant had been added into the $286 billion spending bill by Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio, but did not specify a particular company to be the recipient.
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