Weed electric railroad

[daveklepper]

Elevated railway construction in Manhattan started in the 1860's and was complete by 1890, with the later two short exceptions on the Broadway No. 1 subway line.  Brooklyn was only slightly later, and the Bronx's  one pre-subway construction line was about 1890.  After the first subway line opened in 1904, extensions in outer boroughs were largely on elevated structures, and in some cases surface lines originally steam railroad lines were elevated.  The first elevated extension opened around 1907, operated first by extended elevated train operation until the first tunnel to The Bronx was opened.  The last elevated structure was that used by the F and G lines today in Brooklyn, largely concrete, and opened around 1935.  After that, ramps have been built more recently connecting existing elevated structures to new subway tunnels, in one case replacing a portion of the same structure.  So one can say that elevated structure consruction in New York City was over about a 70 year period, from the mid 1860's to the mid 1930's.

[Wizlish]

This was decades before the New York and Chicago Air Line, or that rather fascinating idea to provide 150 mph trains on six-minute headways between New York and Philadelphia in the early 1890s.

I do not know whether it 'partook' of the contemporary craze for narrow-gauge railway technology, but it was a decidedly interesting variant on how you use narrow gauge effectively for capital cost reduction.  Very few pictures of the test equipment have survived, but they indicate the deployed system would have been very fast, even with the comparatively primitive motors available at the time... and I have little doubt that the state of motors in particular would have been well advanced had the system been built and put into practical operation at the time it was propounded.  I wonder too if the development of telpher or pneumatic systems around this time would affect perceptions, both in design and in public (or financial) acceptance of the idea of an automatic small railway for business.

I am also interested in the finances -- or lack of them -- involved here.  This was (if I recall the timeline correctly) before the era of elevated-railroad mass construction in New York, and might have been affected by one of the economic 'panics' of the era.  Presumably the line would have been constructed in segments between the most profitable intermediate city pairs -- or so I would think -- with the earliest stages being highly publicized to build excitement.

[rcdrye]

CERA bulletin 137 "Faster than the Limiteds" has pretty much the complete history of the project.  The only section of the "Air Line" actually built was from South LaPorte to Goodrun Jct. Indiana, where it was a less-than-successful local interurban.  At that, its two original cars had "New York" on one end and "Chicago" on the other. Eventually it ended up as part of the Gary Railways group before 1918 abandonment.  CERA ( http://cera-chicago.org ) doesn't show the book on its web site any more, but it should be available on ebay or amazon for less than 50 dollars.

The "model railroad" version was one of a number of similar proposals floated late in the 19th century.  The "Air Line" was about the only attempt, small though it was, to make any of them real.

[wanswheel]

Not the Chicago-New York Electric Air Line Railroad?

Excerpt from L.A. Herald, Nov. 4, 1906

http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=LAH19061104.2.67.7&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------1

The new electric road running its trains in half the time at half the cost of the steam trains, will undoubtedly secure the bulk of the mail contracts and all of the through express business. The total mail and express contracts between Chicago and New York amount to many millions of dollars yearly, and the cheapness, speed, and other advantages of the electric road over any of the steam roads are so evident that it is not unreasonable to suppose that most of this traffic will come to the electric road. It will be a matter of business, pure and simple, for it to do so.

[Wizlish]

My father told me something about this, but not enough.

There was a project to build a high-speed electrified 'airline' railway between New York and Chicago long before the famous one that turned into an interurban.  As it turns out, that one more closely resembled a model railroad -- it was intended to specialize only in mail and express, and in the pictures I have seen used comparatively small and low, highly-streamlined vehicles.  I presume a 'production' version would have involved longer trains of cars, in that pre-MU era probably unpowered cars pulled by "locomotives".

I have always thought that this was the 'right' answer to the problems W.H.Vanderbilt mentioned (for example in the famous 'public be damned' interview) about how high-speed full-size trains did not pay.  I remember seeing a quote to the effect that the first railroad that could provide 10-hour timing for critical mail and express would get 'every bit' of that traffic ... not just a preponderance, every bit.  Think of it as a Federal Express-grade service 100 years early.

Are there any scholarly articles or discussions of this?  I was hoping that perhaps an organization like the American side of the Newcomen Society might have taken an interest ... or that one of our resident experts (hint, hint, Mike...) might know where to find better information.