The Great Railroad Revolution (52 page)

The streetcar companies also began to venture into rural pastures, stimulated by demand from people living a few miles out of the cities who had no adequate means of getting there since horse-drawn transportation was expensive and slow. However, it was the interurban railroad, run by separate companies, that most effectively catered to the needs of people living out of town. Largely ignored by railroad historians because of its short life span and rather crude construction, the interurban was nonetheless remarkable for the speed of its expansion and the rapidity of its demise. Mostly separate from both the streetcar and railroad networks, interurbans were electric trains that connected outlying areas of cities with the center or connected neighboring towns. They were essentially long-distance streetcar lines, ranging in length from a few miles to fifty or sixty, built rapidly—six months to a year was typical—and on the cheap, usually by the side of existing highways or on agricultural land offered at little cost by farmers eager to have a rail line adjoining their property. The interurbans filled a gap in the market: catering to relatively sparsely populated areas, which it was widely expected would make its owners a profit.

It was an expectation that would be rarely met. A few interurban schemes were built in the 1890s, and a small number in the decade after the First World War, but the vast majority were built in two short bursts during the first decade of the 1900s in the expectation they would be huge money-makers. The owners' hopes were, sadly, far too optimistic. Some of the early lines were indeed profitable, but that served only to stimulate the construction of a large number of schemes that could never hope to earn a decent rate of return. This rush to create interurban lines constitutes one of those periodic bouts of commercial madness that litter the history of economics, from the Dutch tulip boom of the 1630s to the rush to invest in dot-com
companies in the 1990s: “Even though the interurbans built to connect major cities or to tap rural areas of considerable population density were not, in light of the expectations of the time, irrationally conceived, their construction was accompanied by an outpouring of optimism and a rash of ill-considered projects that, in retrospect, can only be called one of the classic manias.” They were part of a wider movement toward electric traction during the early 1900s, when “electric railway track of all types was being built at about ten times the rate of [conventional] railroad track.”
¹⁸

Interurbans have no precise definition, since the cruder systems were like streetcars and the more sophisticated versions morphed into suburban electric railroads, but they appeared in one form or another in thirty states. The industry enjoyed a meteoric growth, which in a way mirrored the expansion of the railroads in their early years and, similarly, was stimulated by local entrepreneurs, although larger concerns began to consolidate systems in the years running up to the First World War. By 1900, there were already twenty-one hundred miles of interurban railroads, and this figure leaped to nine thousand by the end of 1906 and fifteen thousand by 1913. It was in the midwestern states where they were most prominent. Ohio had far more mileage than any other state, with just under twenty-eight hundred miles of interurban track, and only three towns of more than five thousand inhabitants in the whole state did not have a system. With its well-populated farming areas, largely flat terrain, and numerous mediumsize towns spaced twenty or thirty miles apart, Ohio was perfect territory for interurbans. So was neighboring Michigan, which had the next biggest system with nearly two thousand miles. Pennsylvania, Illinois, California, and New York also all developed extensive networks remarkably quickly. By 1910, many areas of the United States were covered with these slightly ramshackle railroads, the only regional exceptions being the Deep South, the northern plains, and much of the West. Even so, Los Angeles was the hub of the extensive Pacific Electric, “a 1,100 mile interurban system whose ‘big red cars' skirted mile after mile of sandy shoreline, swept past endless acres of orange groves and climbed into the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.” Interestingly, it was this network of streetcar systems, rather than the car, that created the sprawling nature of Los Angeles and its suburbs. All its main highways had a streetcar line running down them, and therefore it was the distance to the streetcar stop that was the limiting
factor in local development. The Pacific Electric interurban system was the brainchild of a developer, Henry E. Huntington, who built it as a loss leader financed by profits from his housing projects. He saw that good transportation was as essential as ensuring the houses had water and electricity and therefore was not concerned that he lost money on providing it: “The result was the characteristic low-rise form of the region, with mile upon mile of ‘California bungalows' spreading along the tentacles of the Pacific Electric Network. This extensive urban spread gave Los Angeles a reputation, which has lasted to this day, as the very model of urban sprawl.”
¹⁹
Lots that were a half-dozen blocks away from the streetcar were simply left undeveloped, but once the car became commonplace, they were built upon and their residents' automobiles soon displaced the streetcars on the highway.

Development of these interurban streetcars was so intensive in parts of the Midwest that it was possible in 1910 to travel continuously by interurban from Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, to Oneonta, New York, a distance of nearly eleven hundred miles. Since their average speed was under twenty miles per hour, because of the frequency of stops, the low power of the electric motors, and the tight curves, it is doubtful that anyone in those pretrainspotter days would have undertaken such a trip. However, in that year a group of businessmen did travel a similar distance entirely on interurbans, from upstate New York to Louisville, Kentucky, using an electric car borrowed from the New York Central, in order to promote the interurban network.

Profitability, though, proved a mirage. Passenger railroads, with their expensive infrastructure and high costs, need dense populations and intensive use, and the interurbans had neither. One or two companies even carried freight in a bid to be viable, but few remained in the black for very long. Consequently, “the interurbans were a rare example of an industry that never enjoyed a period of prolonged prosperity.”
²⁰
The United States was littered with redundant interurban projects whose promoters had failed to raise the capital. Other lines collapsed as soon as they were built: in the case of the Indianapolis, Crawfordsville & Western (even the interurbans had western ambitions!), for instance, the railroad's opening ceremony and its filing for bankruptcy were simultaneous events.

The maddest of these schemes—and there are a lot to choose from— was the plan set out in 1906 by the Chicago–New York Electric Air Line
Railroad for a double-track electric railroad in a straight line between the two cities. It was to be the equivalent of a rail superhighway: no crossings with roads or other rail tracks and only the gentlest of curves to ensure they could be negotiated at ninety miles an hour. Whereas previous crazy schemes for express railroads in the Northeast had never gotten off the drawing board, remarkably some construction on the Air Line Railroad was actually carried out, thanks to its promoter, Alexander Miller, selling enough stock for work to begin in Gary, Indiana. Some fifteen miles of track were built to a very high standard, the cost of which was one of the reasons for the scheme's failure. Inevitably, though, despite the support of its shareholders and the optimism expressed in its own promotional magazine,
Air Line News,
the company stopped building and went bust in 1915.

There was a lot stacked against the interurbans: the hostility of the railroad companies, the limited market they served, the cheapness of the construction (which increased operating costs), and ultimately, after the war, the advent of the Ford Model T and other cheap cars. Yet for a while, the big railroads felt threatened by this crude competitor, not least because many interurbans were backed by powerful electricity companies. Despite the fact that interurbans seemed to cater to a rather limited market and ran, at best, hourly trains with single cars, some railroads were so fearful that they ran concerted campaigns against them and were quick to challenge them in the courts at every available opportunity. The railroads most hostile to the interurbans were the largest, the Pennsylvania and the New York Central, both of which regularly sought injunctions against the interurbans. The trigger for disputes was often the need for the interurban to cross the line of a railroad. On several occasions, injunctions were obtained to prevent the crossing. In one case, in California, the Petaluma & Santa Rosa was banned from crossing the line of the California Northwestern and had to provide a horse-drawn shuttle service to carry its passengers into the town of Santa Rosa. When the Petaluma again attempted to install a crossing over the Northwestern's line in January 1905, its men were confronted with two locomotives on the tracks that were used to douse them with boiling water, an incident known as the Battle of Sebastopol Avenue. In fact, at the local level, “outright violence between interurban employees and railroad men was not uncommon.” When the Ohio Central Traction Company completed its tracks to the village of Crestline, Ohio, a fistfight broke out between its
construction gang and men employed by the Pennsylvania and New York Central. A more common—and civilized—response from the railroad companies was to try to improve their competing service by cutting rates and running more trains. However, their costs were always higher, partly because they were unionized, and they were unable to compete effectively. That did not stop the railroads from continuing their hostility even once the local interurbans were built: “The typical railroad executive was convinced that the interurbans had no ethical right to exist, and was eager to do what he could to eradicate them.”
²¹

The interurbans might have survived the hostility of the railroads, but it was the basic lack of a market—and the impossibility of making money from a schedule that ran just one single car per hour over the tracks—that would prove their undoing. The demise of the interurbans came almost as fast as their construction. Most interurbans had a life span of around twenty to thirty years, and they were killed off by a combination of competition from the car and the deterioration of their equipment. Many of the promoters were given twenty-five-year franchises that ran out around the time of the Great Depression, and since that coincided with the need to buy new equipment, the municipal authorities simply shut the systems down rather than issue new franchises. A few interurbans stuttered on until after the Second World War, but soon succumbed to the automobile, which not only destroyed their remaining customer base but eyed jealously all that extra space next to the highways.

Interestingly, the authors of the key history of the interurbans suggest that they could have been as damaging to the conventional railroads as the Ford Model T, whose very invention stymied their development and killed them off: “Both [interurbans and the Model T] threatened the position of the railroad train as the principal means of passenger transportation; by 1960 [when the book was published] the automobile was providing 90 per cent of intercity passenger miles.” By then, “no trace of the [interurban] industry remained in its original form,” although a handful of routes had been converted to suburban rail use or to freight service.
²²
It was particularly unlucky for the interurbans that cars became a viable alternative to rail just a decade or so after their introduction, which made them, like the fax machine, the punch card, or even the Els, a short-term technology that was rapidly superseded.

The main railroad companies were now adopting modern technology that allowed them to explore new solutions to old problems. America may have been slow to develop subway systems, but it can nevertheless lay claim to the greatest railroad engineering achievement of the early twentieth century. This was the construction by the Pennsylvania Railroad of the tunnels under the East and Hudson Rivers that separate Manhattan from the mainland, a feat that was all the greater since it required the electrification of a large section of the tracks. The Pennsylvania had long been frustrated by its lack of access to Manhattan, as its New York passengers had to traverse the Hudson on ferries. It was Alexander Cassatt, the company's president, who pushed the idea through, though unfortunately he was to die in 1906, before the completion of the project. Of the options available at the time to the Pennsylvania, a bridge was deemed technically too difficult and would have required the cooperation of the New Jersey port authorities, which was not forthcoming. However, the building of a tunnel raised a number of concerns, most notably fears that the use of steam locomotives underground on such a busy commuter route was too much of a safety risk (although by the 1900s, the London Underground had been operating with steam engines in almost continuous tunnels for more than thirty-five years), and therefore the state authorities mandated the use of electric propulsion. The twin-bore tunnels under the Hudson took seven years to build—no mean achievement given the challenges of working under the river, which included using compressed air to keep the water from seeping in. With access from the tunnels, the Pennsylvania Railroad could, at last, have a station on Manhattan, and the decision to cross both rivers meant it had to be a through station rather than a terminus. And, of course, it had to be bigger and grander than the Vanderbilts' nearby Grand Central, which was being rebuilt simultaneously with many beaux arts features. Pennsylvania Station was, indeed, majestic and massive, extending over seven acres, the largest covered indoor space in New York, and was shared with its subsidiary, the local Long Island Rail Road. It, too, was built in the beaux arts style that was the fashion of the day, although the exterior was dominated by a seemingly endless colonnade of pink granite Doric columns. The interior was eclectic in style, with carriageways inspired by the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and a vast waiting room in the style of the Roman Baths of Caracalla. It was, regrettably, to survive barely a half century. In a
piece of architectural vandalism akin to the destruction of the Great Hall and the arch of Euston Station, Penn Station was, to outrage both in America and abroad, demolished in the early 1960s. That was the result of a desperate bid by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was already in its death throes before its fateful merger with the New York Central, to save itself through the construction of Madison Square Garden above today's entirely subterranean and dismal but bustling station.