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Before Interstates, America Got Around on Interurbans

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...a-rail-revival

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- Once, there was no better selling point for your town than an interurban line. These small railways connected small towns and large cities throughout the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, giving residents a chance to go places, literally and metaphorically. The cars were bigger and better-appointed than your standard streetcar, and instead of soot-chuffing steam locomotives, they used the latest clean-energy innovation: electric power provided by the overhead wires known as catenary lines. Any settlements that lacked an interurban badly wanted one, even to the point of faking their existence. — In Ohio, a hotspot for the interurban industry just about every town with a population greater than 5,000 had an interurban connection, except one: Coshocton, an Appalachian town between Canton and Columbus. Roger Grant, a history professor at Clemson University who’s written at length about U.S. railroads, said that postcards from the 1910s show interurbans running through Coshocton anyway. It was that big a deal.

- Instead of the wave of the future, the interurban turned out to be a transitional mode of transportation, Grant says, bridging the gap between the large passenger railroads and personal automobiles. But the dream of clean, fast and frequent rail travel between U.S. cities never really died. And now, with railfan Joe Biden in the White House and $66 billion to expand Amtrak’s passenger rail service in the infrastructure bill that still awaits a final vote in Congress, the interurban era could be an instructive model for what a climate-friendlier national transportation network might look like. — “Lots of corridors need better connections,” says Christof Spieler, a transportation engineer and former board member for Houston’s METRO. “I think rail is part of that, and I think electric rail is part of that.” “If you were on a main line, like between Cleveland and Toledo, you had a lot of choices,” Grant says. — “But if you were out in a smaller community, you might only get one train a day, and that might not run on Sunday. But with interurbans, you had trains running every hour or two hours.”

- Vestiges of the interurban age still exist today, Spieler says, like the T light rail serving the South Hills of Pittsburgh, SEPTA’s Norristown line around Philadelphia and some BART transit in San Francisco. Many a bike trail traces the right-of-way of an abandoned interurban. And the wave of light rail projects undertaken in U.S. cities in the 1980s revived the electric railway concept, though most were designed to shuttle suburban residents into downtowns. “Arguably, light rail is today’s interurbans,” he says. — But the role that interurbans played in American life has never truly been replaced by succeeding modes. The infrastructure demanded by private automobiles proved to be disastrous for U.S. cities, and their ongoing environmental toll is doing even broader damage. For those who can’t drive, a dwindling and cash-strapped intercity bus network connects rural communities that might have once boasted of interurban service. Meanwhile, pie-in-the-sky projects like hyperloops and maglev lines continue to stir the imaginations of city leaders who dream of getting in on the next big thing.

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