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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253341792 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2003 |
| Series: | Railroads Past and Present |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 1,153,619 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.50(w) x 11.00(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
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Metropolitan Railways
Rapid Transit in America
By William D. Middleton
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2003 William D. MiddletonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34179-2
CHAPTER 1
THE QUEST FOR RAPID TRANSIT
Street Railroads and Omnibuses have their uses; but we have reached the end of them. They are wedged for hours at night and morning with men, women, boys and girls sitting, standing, and hanging on; it would not be decent to carry live hogs thus, and hardly dead ones; they are unchangeably too slow; and their capacity is exhausted. To put on more cars or construct more roads is only to monopolize our streets and virtually drive all carriages out of them.
Gentlemen of the Legislature! Give us both the Underground and the Aerial Railway!
-New York Tribune, February 2, 1866
The United States in the post-Revolutionary War period was a fundamentally different society than it was soon to become. When the census-takers made the first of their decennial rounds in 1790, the United States was an overwhelmingly rural nation. There were then fewer than 4 million Americans, and scarcely 1 in 20 of them lived in cities. Philadelphia, then the nation's largest city, had a population of fewer than 55,000.
Within only a few decades this had begun to change. The cities were growing rapidly as the commerce and industry of the new nation developed. By 1830 more than a million people lived in American cities. Possessed of a great natural harbor and linked to the U.S. interior by the new Erie Canal, New York had become the center of American commerce. With a population that now numbered more than 200,000, New York had displaced Philadelphia as the nation's largest city.
For New York and other growing American cities, urban transportation had become an increasingly urgent need. The first urban public transportation had appeared at New York in 1827, when Abraham Brower inaugurated a regular stagecoach service up and down Broadway. Only a few years later John Mason incorporated America's first street railway, the New York & Harlem, which began transporting passengers along New York's Bowery in horse-drawn cars on November 14, 1832. These horse- or mule-powered street railways provided a popular answer to the growing need for urban transportation. Over the next several decades additional lines were constructed at New York, and new systems began operating at other cities. By the end of the 1850s, street railways were also operating at New Orleans, Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Chicago.
For most of these cities the street railways served the need for urban transportation well, and their growth was phenomenal. As early as 1855, New York's horse car lines were transporting more than 18 million passengers a year, and in another 30 years their annual traffic approached 188 million. By 1881 there were some 415 street railway companies in the United States, operating 18,000 cars pulled by more than 100,000 horses and mules over 3000 miles of track. By this time street railways had become an enormous industry, with annual revenues in the vicinity of $1.25 billion.
Long before the end of the nineteenth century, however, even this enormous street railway industry would prove inadequate to meet the public transportation needs of the largest American cities. Far from being a product of the automotive age as so many now regard it, street traffic congestion was a fact of urban life many decades earlier. Nowhere was this more evident than in New York City, which had begun to feel the effects of severe congestion as early as 1850. By this time the city's population had grown to more than half a million, and the city was heavily developed as far north as 42nd Street, nearly 4 miles north of the Battery. The long, narrow shape of Manhattan Island compounded New York's congestion problems, and the city's limited north-south thoroughfares were jammed with drays, cabs, omnibuses, and horse cars. The heaviest traffic was on Broadway, the principal north-south thoroughfare. Some of the worst traffic jams in the city were at Broadway and Fulton, where it was said sometimes to take 20 to 30 minutes to cross the street. An 1850 traffic check revealed that omnibuses made up nearly 40 percent of Broadway traffic, and a rush-hour count found them moving on average headways of only 13 seconds. Travel by horse-drawn vehicle between downtown business areas and the uptown residential districts had already become so time-consuming that growing numbers of New Yorkers were fleeing across the Hudson and East rivers to the New Jersey suburbs and Brooklyn, which could be reached more quickly by ferry services.
The great cities of Europe were confronting similar problems. Urban public transportation in the form of horse-drawn omnibus services had appeared on the streets of Paris and London even earlier than they had in New York, and European cities were soon installing horse-drawn street railways as well. By 1850 London traffic congestion, if anything, was even worse than that in New York, and in 1854 Parliament authorized the construction of underground railways. The city's first subway trains began operating nine years later. Original plans to operate the underground with "fireless" locomotives proved impractical, and smoke, cinders, and steam from the locomotives made travel on this pioneer subway an unpleasant ordeal. By the 1870s Paris would be debating the relative merits of subways and elevated railways, but it would be another thirty years before the first segment of the city's Métropolitain subway would finally open.
New York's problems worsened over the next two decades. By 1860 the city's population had passed 800,000 and annual traffic on the omnibuses and street railways exceeded 36 million passengers. Even this figure more than doubled over the next five years, but the omnibus and horse car services were becoming ever more inadequate for the demands of New York traffic, if an 1864 editorial in the New York Herald is taken as a fair evaluation of the service:
Modern martyrdom may be succinctly defined as riding in a New York omnibus. The discomforts, inconveniences and annoyances of a trip in one of these vehicles are almost intolerable. From the beginning to the end of the journey a constant quarrel is progressing. The driver quarrels with the passengers and the passengers quarrel with the driver. There are quarrels about getting out and quarrels about getting in. There are quarrels about change and quarrels about the ticket swindle. ... Ladies are disgusted, frightened and insulted. Children are alarmed, and lift up their voices and weep. ... Thus the omnibus rolls along, a perfect Bedlam on wheels. ... It is in vain that those who are obliged to ride seek for relief in a city railway car. The cars are quieter than the omnibuses, but much more crowded. People are packed into them like sardines in a box, with perspiration for oil. The seats being more than filled, the passengers are placed in rows down the middle, where they hang on by straps, like smoked hams in a corner grocery. To enter or exit is exceedingly difficult. Silks and broadcloth are ruined in the attempt. As in the omnibuses, pickpockets take advantage of the confusion to ply their vocation. ... The foul, close, heated air is poisonous. A healthy person cannot ride a dozen blocks without a headache. ... it must be evident to everybody that neither the cars nor the stages supply accommodation enough for the public, and that such accommodations as they do supply are not of the right sort. ... something more is needed to supply the popular and increasing demand for city conveyances.
What clearly seemed to be needed was some new form of transportation that could accommodate New York's enormous traffic volume quickly, free from the restrictions imposed by the city's clogged streets. There soon proved to be no shortage of promoters who thought they had the solution to the problem.
One of the earliest proposals for a rapid transit scheme came from Alfred Ely Beach, the flamboyant and inventive proprietor and editor of Scientific American, who advanced the idea of a subway for New York in an editorial, "An Underground Railroad in Broadway," in the November 3, 1849, issue of his magazine:
The plan is to tunnel Broadway through the whole length, with openings and stairways at every corner. This subterranean passage is to be laid down with a double track, with a road for foot passengers on either side — the whole to be brilliantly lighted with gas. The cars, which are to be drawn by horses, will stop ten seconds at every corner — thus performing the trip up and down, including stoppages, in about an hour.
The Broadway subway plan was ahead of its time, but it was soon followed by a variety of innovative ideas for rapid transit, many of them set forth in the pages of Beach's Scientific American. Most of these early proposals were for some form of elevated railway. One of the first was advanced in 1853 by James H. Swett, a Pittsburgh inventor, who proposed a bizarre sort of elevated railway supported by iron columns placed along the curb. Arms branching from the top of the column like a tuning fork left room for the passage of a passenger car that was to be suspended from a steam locomotive running on rails at the top of the structure. Passengers boarded the cars from platforms reached by stairways from the sidewalk. "No wood as fuel is to be or would be allowed in Broadway on any engine," commented Scientific American; "it might set fire, by a stray spark, to one of Stewart's bales of fine French muslins, and that would never answer." Instead, the locomotives would be fired with coke, emitting neither smoke nor sparks.
A year later J. B. Wickersham, a New York manufacturer of iron railings, presented a plan for an elevated railroad terrace along Broadway. A single row of columns placed just inside the curb would support an ornate iron elevated structure above the sidewalk that would carry both a horse car line on the outside and a pedestrian promenade inside next to the buildings. Access stairways to the terrace would be constructed inside the adjacent buildings. To reduce the noise of the horse cars, Wickersham proposed to lay the rails on India rubber sills. At some future date the development of propulsion by "atmospheric pressure" would replace horse power.
Neither of these, nor any of the many other fanciful schemes for elevated railways that were advanced over the next few years, received more than passing attention. A quite different proposal for Broadway rapid transit put forth by Michigan railroad man Hugh B. Willson, who returned from a visit to London in 1863 much impressed by that city's new Metropolitan Railway Company, a 4-mile subway operated with coal-burning steam locomotives. Willson promptly rounded up New York backers and incorporated his own Metropolitan Railway Company to build a similar line in New York. Willson's chief engineer, A. P. Robinson, came up with plans for a double-track brick arch tunnel to be constructed under Broadway from the Battery to 34th Street and thence under Sixth Avenue to 59th Street. Motive power, as on the London system, was to be steam. A bill to grant the subway enterprise a charter failed to make it through the New York State legislature in 1864, more than likely as a result of the intense opposition of the city's existing street railway companies. A second try the following year got past the legislature only to be vetoed by Gov. Reuben Fenton. And that was as far as Mr. Willson's subway went.
A somewhat similar scheme put forth a few years later was the Arcade Railway proposed by H. C. Gardner and Melville P. Smith, which was to operate from the Battery to the north end of Manhattan Island. A principal line would extend along Broadway and Ninth Avenue to a junction with the Hudson River Railroad near Fort Washington, while a branch from the Broadway line via Park Row and the Bowery would follow Third Avenue to the Harlem River and a junction with the New York & Harlem Railroad. Designed by civil engineer S. B. B. Nowlan, the Arcade Railway was to be built by excavating the street to a depth of 25 feet from wall to wall of the buildings on either side. The lower 10 feet was to be occupied by sewers and tunnels through which refuse removal carts would operate, above which four tracks were to be provided on the sub-street or arcade, with trains operating at five miles an hour on the outer tracks for way passengers, while trains operating at 15 miles an hour on the inner tracks would stop only at stated points. Locomotives "emitting neither smoke nor sparks" would power the trains.
Rows of iron columns and concrete arches would support a new street and walks at the original level, with openings surrounded by iron railings on each side between the street and walks to allow light to reach the arcade level. Pedestrian walks were to be provided at the arcade level on either side of the tracks, providing access to new stores in building basements or sub-basements to be constructed by the Arcade Railway Company. "Property owners on the streets will be gainers by an addition to their rentable property," commented Scientific American, "and the sub-roadway will become a favorite means of transit in stormy weather and as a shelter from torrid suns."
The promoters managed to get a series of bills authorizing construction of the Arcade Railway through the New York legislature between 1870 and 1885, but all were vetoed by the incumbent governors.
Even as the Arcade Railway promoters were developing their plans for a subway and seeking approval to build it, the Scientific Americans Alfred Ely Beach went right ahead and built one. Beach, who had long championed the idea of a subway for New York, had become an advocate of the pneumatic system of transmitting packages. If a container carrying a package of letters could be blown through a tube, reasoned Beach, why not a package of human beings in a car? Under this concept, passenger cars would fit into an elevated or underground tube like bullets in a rifle barrel and would be driven above or under the streets at high speeds by air pressure from giant fans. Beach exhibited a working model of his pneumatic railroad at the American Institute Fair held at New York's Fourteenth Street Armory in 1867. A wooden tube 6 feet in diameter suspended from the roof of the building ran from Fourteenth to Fifteenth streets. A car open at the top and fitted with a piston end was drawn in and forced back through the tube by suction and pressure from a propeller fan, 10 feet in diameter and turning at a rate of 200 revolutions per minute. Great crowds came to see the novel device, and the car was kept in constant operation, transporting hundreds of people.
Beach soon organized the Beach Pneumatic Transit Company and obtained legislative authority to build pneumatic tubes not greater than 54 inches in diameter to convey letters, parcels, and merchandise under Broadway from Warren to Cedar streets. A later charter amendment authorized the construction of one larger tube that would hold two smaller ones. Construction was soon underway for what turned out to be quite a different project. Beginning from the rented basement of clothier Devlin & Company on the corner of Broadway and Warren Street, a tunnel 9 feet 4 inches in outside diameter was drilled about 400 feet south under Broadway to a point just south of Warren Street.
A notable feature of the work was the pneumatic shield employed to drill the tunnel. Patented by Beach, it was an advanced version of shields developed earlier in the century by British tunnelers Marc Isambard Brunei, James Henry Greathead, and Peter W. Barlow for tunneling under the Thames at London. Beach's shield was a short cylindrical section of heavy timber backed by a wrought iron ring, against which hydraulic jacks forced the shield forward. Doors in the front of the shield controlled the entry of material as the tunnel was excavated. The shield was driven forward about 16 inches at a time by jacking it against the completed brick tunnel. After another 16 inches of brick tunnel was completed, the operation was repeated.
The tunnel itself was drilled in only 58 days, largely in secret, with the excavated material removed through the sub-basement and basement of 260 Broadway, at Murray Street, which had been rented for that purpose. The public became aware of the work only after a New York Tribune reporter, disguised as a workman, gained access to the tunnel and his newspaper published an account of the project. His secrecy lost, Beach threw open the tunnel for public inspection, charging a 25-cent admission fee that went to charity.
Instead of completing the tunnel for the pneumatic transmission of packages, as called for in his charter, Beach decided to use it to demonstrate his idea for a pneumatic subway. A little 18-seat car that traveled through the tube was a veritable jewel box on wheels, richly upholstered and brilliantly illuminated by a zircon lamp. The waiting station was described as a commodious, airy, and comfortable apartment. With a shrewd sense of showmanship, Beach had the walls decorated with frescoes and elegant paintings and installed a grand piano, fountain, and goldfish tanks. Zircon lamps illuminated the room.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Metropolitan Railways by William D. Middleton. Copyright © 2003 William D. Middleton. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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