Chicago-New York Electric Air Line Railroad

The history of railways is also a history of modern capitalism: the development of the company limited by guarantee, of the giant joint stock corporation, of corporate finance and banking systems, of the split between management and shareholders.


During the development of railways, all the practices we currently regard as being bad also emerged: pyramid selling, paying for dividends out of capital to ramp up share prices in speculation, cartels and monopolistic pricing, political and judicial corruption... Railways also created ever more spectacular financial bubbles -- such was the financial success of the first railways that they spawned "manias", where lines were proposed between the most unlikely places that could never have made profit, but which succeeded in attracting willing investors.

In that heady world, it's sometimes difficult to tell whether any particular scheme was designed for fraud from the beginning, or was just spectacularly misguided. And of those schemes, one of the most problematic has been the 1905 Chicago--New York Electric Air Line Railroad.

Conceived at the end of the nineteenth century, it consisted of a direct line linking the two most important commercial cities in the US. And by "direct", I mean direct:


It's the sort of thing a child might do if asked to design a railway line. It avoids all the major centres of population in the 700 or so miles between the two cities. It ignored all the geographical features which would have made such a route extraordinarily expensive to build (the main competing routes were shown on the map in green).

And the company's sales pitch was a simple recognition of those facts: it would offer the fastest express route between those two cities, using the then-latest electrical traction technology.


Driving today would take around 13 hours. Flying would take around 2, plus, of course, transport from airports to the city centres and check-in time -- say 4 or so hours total. CNYEALRR promised to do the journey in what was then a revolutionary time of ten hours (in 1905 the fastest competing train took double that).

To achieve these speeds, the line was conceived as an express electric interurban, so the civil engineering works on the route were of an immensely high order. Vast quantities of earth were shifted in the first section to be built, and construction started on some of the huge bridges that were needed.




It all ended disastrously. A recession in 1907 led to the capital drying up, and the expenses of construction were so vast that only a tiny proportion of the route was completed. The company collapsed, and the tracks it left behind formed the foundations of the Gary Railway, a local interurban railway.


In common with most interurbans, the system was defeated by road traffic. Whether the original airline railway could have made a go of it, had it been built, is for idle speculation.

What's for sure is that the sketch design of electric steeplecab developed by the company was sexily streamlined.


It's an intriguing "might have been".