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Chicago South Shore & South Bend In Color Vol 2 Insull’s Road: 1948-1969 Doughty
Chicago South Shore & South Bend In Color Vol 2 Insulls Road: 1948-1969 by Geoffrey H Doughty
Morning Sun Books
Hard Cover w/Dust jacket
128 pages
Copyright 2007
CONTENTS
Preface:4
Introduction:8
Part One: In a Class by Itself 18
Part Two: Balancing Act 1950-196030
Part Three: Juggling Act 1960-1968102
INTRODUCTION
The history of transportation is a story of evolution. Beginning with the invention of the wheel, many forms of transport have evolved and improved with the changing of generations.
The American electric interurban, once considered a giant advance in transportation in an era when only crude dirt roads connected our communities, was but a brief, yet important, chapter in that saga. But the interurban was not created in a vacuum, for were it not for the advent of electric power and the distribution system developed by Thomas Edison near the close of the 19th century, there would have been no electric interurban, but perhaps some other creation.
The Edison power distribution system made available on a wide scale an inexpensive energy source, making the electric interurban an affordable means of transport in a period before the mass production of the gasoline combustion engine, the growing affordability of the automobile and the concrete highway. Thus, for a relatively short period of time, the interurban became an integral part of the social fabric of life, especially in rural areas. Naturally, not all interurbans were "created equal," as they reflected the character of the communities they served. The interurbans that developed across Iowa, for example, differed in style and character from those that sped or took their leisurely time to cross parts of Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Vermont, Maine, Connecticut, New York, or Massachusetts, to name but a few, or in urban centers, such as Los Angeles.
Interwoven with the story of the Chicago South Shore & South Bend, at least in the early years up to 1932, is the story of Samuel Insull, an ambitious British-born protof Thomas Edison who had come to Chicago at Edison's behest to consolidate the electric utility production and distribution system in the Midwest. Not one to miss an opportunity when it presented itself, when asked by the directors of the Chicago Edison Company who was the best person to become the new president of the company, Insull recommended himself, assuming the position on July 1, 1892. Slowly, but deliberately, Insull began acquiring and merging existing electric utilities, but also gaining control of electric railways in the country's midsection. In the process, he created Commonwealth Edison, among other electric and gas utilities, and in the process created an electric interurban railway empire.
Although the company was a railroad, the Chicago South Shore & South Bend was by definition an "interurban." Most frequently interurbans were a subsidiary of an electric utility and while primarily involved with passenger transport, often there was a modicum of freight service, usually less-than-carload ("1c1") or small package express. Equipment consisted mostly of self-propelled passenger rolling stock operating independently that had limited capacity and was operated by a "motorman," with or without a conductor or ticket collector. The interurbans' physical plant was also built to different specifications than that of a railroad, typically operating on city streets as streetcars with lines extending outward to suburbs or to neighboring cities, utilizing lighter rail. Between communities, roadbed was of a lesser quality than that of its steam counterpart.
The interurbans' rise was steady, from 5,000 miles of lines in 1890 to a peak of 29,000 miles in 1922. Their demise was steady also. The introduction of the automobile and the sudden affection for the improvement in lifestyle that was promised by the concept of personalized transport spelled a dismal future for the quaint one-car conveyance and portended the future of American transportation. As early as 1916 when Congress passed the first omnibus transportation bill, and subsequent bills at two-year intervals, the country's highest legislative body laid the foundation of what would later be considered to be landmark transportation policy. However flawed the concept seems almost a century later, it seemed right at the time, and taxpayer funding became available for the construction of paved roads. Congress never looked back.
American ingenuity, coupled with the entrepreneurial spirit, brought forth a multitude of automobile manufacturers, many whose names are long forgotten today. Although the concept of mass transit was not dead by any means, nobody foresaw at that point in time how rural life would be altered by the automobile. The early roads were still crude by modern standards, but, progress by any measure, was coming more rapidly. The Holland Tunnel under the Hudson River (named after its architect, Clifford Holland) opened to traffic on November 12, 1926, an indication of the rapid investment then being made in the expanding highway infrastructure. (The first truck through the tunnel was et route to Bloomingdales.)
Concurrently, bus line growth expanded from practically nothing in 1922 to more than 50,000 route-miles by 1937 and two of the first victims of this growth were the city trolley and the interurban. The flexibility of the bus ultimately overcame the convenience of the fixed rail system. In 1925, the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, which dominated public transport in Southern New England, organized its own bus subsidiary; by 1935, 70 railroads had done the same. Even though by 1935 only a little more than 20% of American families, or one out of five, owned a car, one can follow the decline in interurban use during the same period. As that percentage of ownership increased, and as the population moved away from the cities, the options available in transport over paved roads changed the dynamics of public transit.
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