I've been a public transit fanatic ever since I started collecting bus schedules at the age of 5. Unfortunately, I no longer have the ones I collected when I was a child.

    I grew up in the 1970s, when the Metropolitan Transit Commission was constantly expanding bus service to new and more distant suburbs. My parents were very opposed to this, believing it to be a waste of taxpayer money. They believed that buses shouldn't go anywhere the old streetcars didn't. I loved going for recreational bus rides and that's what I spent virtually all of my allowance on. I fell in love with a non-MTC bus company called North Suburban Lines which operated on Rice Street in Saint Paul, and later with Medicine Lake Lines on the Olson Memorial Highway in Minneapolis. I paid zero attention to the fact that the Olson Highway was a "bad neighbourhood"; though in reality it didn't affect my rides as Medicine Lake was an express service that didn't stop within the city limits. Medicine Lake buses went to Golden Valley, New Hope, and Crystal, which at the time weren't bad neighbourhoods though that's changed somewhat.

    Though I used to argue with my parents about the MTC, as I thought the expansion of bus service was a good thing, I did an about face in the summer of 1981. I started advocating for a retraction of bus service to the levels in effect, not in 1954 when the streetcars were abolished as my parents believed in, but in 1970 when MTC took over Twin City Lines. Thus began my serious interest in the history of the transit system. At first my idea was that every transit company in the Twin Cities should be restored to the routes, fares, and schedules in effect at the time it was taken over by MTC. However, that soon became problematic with one of the bus companies I cared about most, North Suburban Lines. Before 1975, North Suburban was called Rice-Edgerton Lines (and way before that it was called North Star Lines, a name my mother apprently remembered). The Edgerton part was taken over by MTC in 1975, that's what prompted the name change (and yes, this company is why the name Edgerton is so important to me in politics and religion). The problem was that Rice and Edgerton weren't two seperate routes; the Rice-Edgerton route went from Saint Paul out Rice Street to Little Canada Road to Edgerton to County Road F back to Highway 49 to County Road J. After 1975, MTC ran Saint Paul Route 2 on Edgerton, coming from the Arkwright area. North Suburban Lines continued providing Rice Street service to Circle Pines and Lexington (past County Road J) until the late 1990s. Actually, Lorenz Bus Company, the alter ego of North Suburban, still operates buses on that and several other routes, but under a Metro Council contract rather than as a truly independent service. The question arose: What time frame should Rice-Edgerton Lines be brought back to? 1975? or the final coup de grace in the late 1990s? Either one would have left a gross inconsistency. Finally I decided that all transit systems in the Twin Cities should be broght back to 19 September 1970, the day MTC bought Twin City Lines. Eventually that changed to all transit systems in the Nation of Edgerton that I advocate bringing into being, and later a minor change of date was made to 18 September 1970. The reason for this is the actual handover of the cheque for MTC's purchase of Twin City Lines happened about 5 PM on the 18th, even though buses didn't actually start running under MTC auspices until midnight the beginning of the 19th. This may seem a minor point, but especially since the 19th was a Saturday, it is possible that a transit system somewhere may have had a schedule change on the 19th, which would mean that schedule would have never run contemporaneously with Twin City Lines' existence. That would violate the whole concept behind this ideology.

    These two contemporaneous happenings are of interest: Jimi Hendrix died on 18 September 1970, and the Mary Tyler Moore Show premiered on the 19th.

    My interest in studying old transit system documents will some day propel me to write a book about it which I plan to call Between the Rails: Bus-Only Transit in the Twin Cities, 1954-2004. One of my dreams is to find a complete set of the last Twin City Lines schedules in effect before the MTC takeover. For me that would be like finding the Holy Grail!