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Duneland Electric South Shore Line In Transition by Donald Kaplan w/dust jacket
Duneland Electric South Shore Line In Transition by Donald Kaplan (Cover has reflections of the light)
Hard Cover with dust jacket (has plastic protective cover)
112 pages
Copyright 1984
Introduction6
1 Escape from the loop8
2 In the shadow of the mills 16
3 Duneland electric 32
4 Streetwise in Michigan City 48
5 Shops: genius department 60
6 Interurban time machine 72
7 From Pullman to Sumitomo88
8 From Joes to Geeps96
9 A new interurban era106
Introduction
I n the animals of American public transportation, the interurban electric railway was unique. For a railsystem as extensive (16,100 miles) and as widespread as it became, it experienced the shortest boom (from about 1895 to 1915) and the most precipitous decline of any transport mode in the United States. By the end of the Great Depression, the vast majority of properties had been abandoned and only those few interurbans that developed a healthy carload freight business and achieved some integration into the nation's railroad system were able to survive into the postwar period.
The interurban was the rural offspring of the street railway systems that developed in municipalities prior to the turn of the century. A hybrid between a local trolley and a steam road-type train, the interurban's passenger rolling stock characteristically was larger, faster and more comfortable than that of its street railway cousins. But while the interurbans usually had a private right-of-way in the country, they depended upon street railway trackage for access to major cities and towns. For many of the systems such extensive amounts of street running, with tight curvature and clearances, was an impediment to the development of extensive freight services. The extent to which these companies mixed motormen and motorists meant the difference between survival and failure when competition from automobiles and buses became keen in the 1920's. It was only on the more heavily constructed interurbans that enough freight revenues could be developed to prop up failing passenger services during the lean years of the Depression.
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