Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
I think the Cincy tunnels were for light rail.
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No it was designed and built as high platform heavy rail - same as the Boston red line.
The Cincinnati story is very complicated. The reason why "streetcars" confuse the story is because the Cincinnati Street Railway was always expected to be the primary tenant of the city-built, city-owned tunnels and surface ROW, except existing or future streetcars were never expected to use it. Instead, the CSR was going to purchase heavy rail trains identical to Boston's Cambridge-Dorchester subway and do fareless streetcar/subway transfers at the rapid transit stations.
Minor tenants (and possibly sub-tenants of the CSR) were to be rural interurban railroads as well as (mostly overnight) freight deliveries to an underground freight depot. The turnouts for said depot were built but the structure itself was not.
The great flaw in the state law that enabled the City of Cincinnati to build the Rapid Transit Loop was that there was no way to force the Cincinnati Street Railroad to sign the franchise agreement. The thought was that the City could intimidate the street railway into signing the franchise (and therefore obligate it to many capital expenses not limited to finishing the stations, laying the rail, and buying the trains) by threatening to compete with it by opening its own operation (i.e. like how NYC's IND sent the IRT and BMT into bankruptcy), but as (bad) luck would have it, WWI inflation prevented the City from having enough money from the 1916 bond issue to pull it off.