WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT RESEARCHED: Professor Newmark did some digging into the National City Lines case and the conspiracy (if there was one) to replace streetcars with buses. Very well researched. He commends this paper, which does a good job debunking the technological-lock-in-by-deep-pockets-sponsor argument (which likely would make such a paper popular at North Carolina State.) I have a couple of nits to pick with the paper. First, I believe it was Walt Kelly (of Pogo, how do I make this thing display in Old English Hymnal Type) who most famously paraphrased Commodore Perry. More significantly, the paper neglects one symptom of the decline of the streetcar that was forestalled by the transit cartel. If, as the paper correctly notes, streetcar companies are regulated utilities granted an exclusive franchise in exchange for supervision of its fares, that social compact means the police power gets used to arrest unauthorized competition, such as Model T owners helping meet the payments on their cars by offering a lift in exchange for a nickel. (That practice got the name "jitney" and most municipalities outlawed them, restricting cars-for-hire to franchised taxicab companies, although the jitney offered faster-than-streetcar service, particularly off-peak, for less-than-streetcar fares.)

Reader Patrick Sullivan, who has contributed to the Roger Rabbit discussion, requested a bit more information about the effect of the Public Utility Holding Company Act on transit properties. The Public Utility Holding Company Act arose in reaction to the fallout from downward-leverage which was particularly lurid in power companies during the Great Depression. Lots of leverage coupled with lots of irreversibilities turns into lots of losses, particularly to owners of the topmost holding company stock. During the run-up of stock prices in the 1920s, those companies were particularly attractive investments for buyers of odd-lots or small numbers of lots, because the leverage in the upward direction can be particularly rewarding. (So, some people thought, was paying $3000 for a warehouse with $10 of earnings and a website. Plus ca change ...)

The Public Utility Holding Company Act is one of these obscure pieces of legislation, I recommend locating the first edition of Clair Wilcox's Public Policies Toward Business, which provides as a hypothetical a particularly lurid collapse of a holding company, as well as presenting the corporate structure of the Insull holding companies at the time of their bankruptcy in 1932. What effect did the Holding Company Act have on streetcars? According to Hilton and Due, The Electric Interurban Railways in America (I'm quoting from the original at p. 179, that's in the government regulation chapter if you're using the 2000 paperback), "In 1935 Congress enacted the Public Utility Holding Company Act; the Securities and Exchange Commission interpreted the provisions concerning the elimination of holding-company systems to require that the power companies divest themselves of their electric railway affiliates and dissolve the pyramided holding company structures. As a consequence, the interurbans that were elements in the holding company systems were separated, usually by public sale of the stock. This was the fate of Illinois Terminal, originally owned by Illinois Power Company, the West Penn, the Ohio Public Service, the Portland Traction lines, the MIlwaukee system, the Monongahela West Penn, and others. Most interurbans had been abandoned before the act became effective." What connection, then, to National City Lines? The conspiracy began in 1937, meaning at about the same time that divestitures of the remaining transit properties began. (In 1938, for example, "Milwaukee Electric Lines" became the short form of The Milwaukee Electric Railway and Transit Corporation, the "Transit" referring to trackless trolleys and motor buses, no more Light, no more Tom Moore Likes Rats and Eats Cooked Onions.) Significantly, the properties named by Hilton and Due, and many of the properties not named (most notably the Chicago interurbans, L system, and surface lines) were among the better interurbans, and some of their home cities are spending large sums of money to replace parts of them today. Perhaps in the absence of the divestitures, the transit divisions of power companies in larger cities could have continued. There may not, however, be sufficient information to determine whether the post-1937 bus conversions were any faster in National City Lines cities than in other cities, or any slower in former holding-company cities than in cities with independent streetcar companies.

MAYBE OUR POLICY MAKERS WILL REGRET THE PUBLIC UTILITY HOLDING COMPANY ACT.

We've been following, with some interest, the emergence of a private venture to build a proper high-speed railroad Deep In the Heart of Texas.  One way for the project's developers to cope with opposition (are a few trains an hour really more annoying than jets flying over or a crowded superhighway) is to build along existing utility corridors.

The U.S. Department of Transportation and Federal Railroad Administration released a report Aug. 10 supporting Texas Central Railway’s decision to use that pathway for the 240-mile line.

“TCR identified this corridor to take advantage of relatively straight, existing long, linear infrastructure easements between Dallas and Houston,” the report says. “The Utility Corridor would follow the Centerpoint Energy and Oncor Electric Delivery high-voltage electrical transmission lines.”

Essentially, this would prevent TCR from having to condemn more land, since utility rights of way already exist, than it would if it had to go through the Interstate 45 corridor, for example.

Thus the connection back to the Public Utility Holding Company Act, a bit of misguided social progress that in protecting investors from pyramided stock, broke all ties between power companies and electric railways.

Look around, dear reader, and you'll see evidence of how that tie made the provision of electric railways easier.  The last interurban was once part of Samuel Insull's Midwest Utilities.

Power line and rail line together at Beverly Shores, Indiana.

If the Skokie Swift ever gets north of Dempster Street, there's another utility corridor, once shared by The North Shore Line and the Commonwealth Edison portion of Midwest Utilities.

Harmswoods Station at Golf Road, looking southeast.

George Krambles photograph from B-107 Route of the Electroliners.

And The Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company made the affiliation explicit.

The tracks ran directly under high-tension transmission lines, with one steel structure supporting both the high-tension wires for the Power Company, and the trolley wires for streetcars and interurbans.  A few stretches of the original transmission lines remain in the Milwaukee area, perhaps praying for the return of the interurbans.

Light your candles to the Patron Saint of Interurbans that Texas gets it right.

BUSINESS TYPOGRAPHY DOESN'T HAVE TO BE UGLY.  The latest edition of First and Fastest has a feature on the never-finished Milwaukee interurban subway.  The inside cover of the magazine reproduces an announcement of the last section of the Rapid Transit Line to be built.

The subway was a casualty of a housing bubble.  Milwaukee Electric, at the time operator of the power company that became Wisconsin Electric Power, currently WE Energies as well as of the interurban lines, was expecting additional suburban development to boost both ridership on the interurbans and sales of electricity (and lightbulbs and appliances: in those days you could get off the interurban or a streetcar at the Public Service Building, trade in your worn-out lightbulbs, and place an order for an icebox or a washing machine) and finance the completion of the subway.  The Fed's credit contraction of the late 1920s ended the housing bubble, and the Public Utility Holding Company Act ended the joint operation of a power company with city and suburban cars.  Lightbulb replacement contracts, and the sale of appliances, disappeared later.

Now look closely at the left side of that announcement.  There's a description of the Last Section Completed that manages to list the highlights of the new line without recourse to a colon or bullet points.

The Public Utility Holding Company Act was the E-T-T-S moment for the interurbans.  The discovery of the bullet list was the E-T-T-S moment for business typography.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES. The Overhead Wire endorses a transfer from Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space.

Congress passes the Public Utility Holding Company Act. Heralded as a consumer protection milestone, it also gives utilities a quick method to drop their traction systems. This becomes one of the nails in the coffin of streetcar and interurban railroads in the U.S.

I've commented frequently on the Public Utility Holding Company Act (keep scrolling) and welcome recognition of its side consequences, particularly when it comes from sources that would ordinarily object to iconoclasm where Saint Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose obsession with Samuel Insull led to the passage of the Act, is concerned.

WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? Newmark's Door discovers yet another claim that the National City Lines case is evidence of a vast conspiracy by oil refiners, and tire and bus manufacturers to bundle their product and make a lot of money by buying streetcar companies and substituting buses. The comments are interesting as well. (And yes, the Superintendent is still considering a suggestion box.)

If there is a villain in the piece, it is most likely to be the relative inflexibility of electric traction, be it a trolley of any kind =={interurban, streetcar, light rail, heavy rail}, to move with the populations. The second most likely villain is the Public Utility Holding Company Act. In order to prevent the abuse of leverage inherent in holding companies holding holding companies holding holding companies, this Act limited the laddering of holding companies to one or two layers. The typical corporate structure of a power company had the transit division (and now you begin to grasp what The Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company implies, nicht wahr?) embedded several layers distinct from the power division. Thus, to comply with the act, the transit division had to stand on its own, and often had to make lease payments to the power company for rights-of-way (many interurbans being built to provide transportation incidental to the corridor for the power lines; many amusement parks were built to provide opportunities to use cars otherwise idle on weekends, but that's a different divestiture), effectively ending the subsidy provided by the power division to the rail division (everywhere except, for some strange reason, New Orleans. I am not joking. Locate the 1971 edition of the National Electric Rate Book and see for yourself.)

The conversion of rails to buses began long before the National City Lines bundling conspiracy did. There may be a research project in this: was the rate of conversion in National City Lines cities any faster than the rate of conversion in comparable cities with independent transit operators? My suspicion is that the answer is no.

THINKING ABOUT BANKING.

At Talk Left, the short version. The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act is not the culprit.

Lehman Brothers did not fail because it engaged in commercial banking. And no commercial bank will fail because it engaged in investment banking.

The American Prospect's Robert Kuttner dissents.

But if government must act to contain wider damage when large banks fail, then it is obliged to act to prevent damage from occurring in the first place. Otherwise, the result is what economists term "moral hazard"-- an invitation to take excessive risks.

That's partially correct. The actions the government takes to contain wider damage sometimes -- as is the case with deposit insurance -- come bundled with moral hazard.

MAKE THE DEMOCRATS RENOUNCE THE PUBLIC UTILITY HOLDING COMPANY ACT.

The upcoming Democratic National Convention will take place in Milwaukee just after Bastille Day, and the successor company to The Milwaukee Electric Railway and Electric Company, currently trading as WE Energies, will underwrite extended hours of service for the new Milwaukee streetcar.

There is a mayoral election in progress in the Cream City, and the streetcar continues to be a, well, political football.

One of [mayor Tom Barrett's]  opponents was quick to blast the streetcar news.

"The money that is going to be used on that streetcar could be used to address the poverty in our community," mayoral candidate Tony Zielinski said. "It could be used to address the plight of the African American population. It could be used to address public safety issues."

Riders remain divided about the future of the streetcar.

The Hop continues to be free after the city could not install fare collection equipment in time when the Potawatomi Hotel & Casino's free rides expired.

The casino pledged $10 million to support the streetcar system.

The continued operation of the streetcar, and possible expansion beyond the Near East Side routing, remain to be determined.

Once upon a time, the Power Company and the Transport Company were one company, but a New Deal reform intended to prevent future Enrons (see what I did there?) required the separation of  electric power companies from electric railway companies.

Is it too much to ask that one of the Hop cars (which bend the corner around) be wrapped in a way as to honor a past series of Milwaukee streetcars that also bent the corner around?

Unattributed "Where the Streetcar Bends the Corner Around" image retrieved from Google Images.

Green above the belt rail, yellow with a touch of orange below.  Interior car cards with the National Recovery Administration Blue Eagle optional.

MORE RAILROAD READING? Live from the Third Rail discovers a review of Central Indiana Interurban. The discovery perpetuates the automotive conspiracy myth.

The interurbans, which connected small cities and towns with metropolitan areas, were so commonplace that most large cities had were connected to one by the early 1920s. However, by the late 1930s virtually all of the interurban services were extinct. Many fell victim to GM and other auto-industrial companies, as did the street cars in Los Angeles. Others simply became redundant as the automobile proved more flexible and versatile modes of transportation across and around America's vast interior.

Umm, no, the National City Lines case does not identify a vast automotive conspiracy to destroy the interurbans. Interurbans might well have been the dot.com bubble of the early 1900s; the bubble popped well before the Great Depression. Newmark's Door has the roundup on that. A more likely villain might be President Franklin Roosevelt's Public Utility Holding Company Act, something inadvertently alluded to in the review.

The one interurban to survive, the South Shore Railroad, did so because Samuel Insull, the utility magnate whose holdings included Commonwealth Edison and the Northern Indiana Public Service Company, also owned the South Shore from 1925 until 1932, according to the Shore Line Interurban Historical Society.

In other words, he helped usher the South Shore into the era of public subsidies for passenger transport. That is considered to be the reason why the electric train, which still travels from Chicago to South Bend and back on a regular schedule, is the only interurban that successfully made the transition to a commuter railroad.

That's part of it. The Insull interests also owned the Chicago Aurora and Elgin, the Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee, and the Indiana Railroad. The first two entered Chicago on respectively the Metropolitan and Northwestern Elevated tracks, which precluded much freight train service; the third served primarily rural areas. The South Shore, on the other hand, serves the steel mill country along the South Shore (obviously) and although it runs in city streets, the street trackage provided sufficient space for freight trains. For many years, the freight revenues sufficed to cover losses attributable to the passenger service.

TO REITERATE: THE SUPERINTENDENT KNOWS HIS EMUS. A commenter to the first post in this series notes that the German and Italian railways were playing around with luxury streamlined electric and diesel trains during the era of the Flying Yankee and the Comet. True enough, although a flying sandwich and an allusion to a stick in one eye just fail to stir the blood. (Here is the Italian family described in English, scroll down for Mussolini's anticipation of the Electroliner.) But it wasn't until AFTER the Second World War that the Italians came up with a forward view to match this, and the Germans are Johann kommt spätlich at it.

Racine, Wisconsin, 28 September 1957.

And the story of the Electroliners is more compelling. No fascist megalomania here ... a bankrupt electric railroad orphaned by the Public Utility Holding Company Act inspired by the failure of the Insull power and electric railway holding company that provided the Depression-era Enron-style corporate scandal borrows money from its employees (which was never repaid) to buy two state-of-the-art electric trains just in time for World War II. The North Shore transported many boots to and from liberty at the on-line Great Lakes Naval Training Station, and the railroad managed to stay in operation until just after Wisconsin suffered its most recent loss in the Rose Bowl.

THEY ROLLED OUT OF COLD SPRING SHOPS. A street resurfacing project in Waukesha (which, if that village's past history is any indication, will lead to yet another reversal of direction of one-way streets in village center) includes the unearthing and removal of rails from the long-lost interurban.

Waukesha Freeman photo by Kevin Harnack

Spring City Chronicle, who unearthed the images, uses the occasion to take a dig at the latest light rail projects in Greater Milwaukee.

Examples of the light rail line which once linked southeastern Wisconsin communities and went out of business because it lost huge sums of money and no one rode it are in the blog’s header and decorating this post.

I replicate the poster's use of bold italics, where either alone would suffice.
Snarking aside, the reasons for the failure of the interurban include the forced divestiture of Railway from Light under the Public Utility Holding Company Act and the use of tax money to build rights-of-way for competing bus lines and private vehicles that now creep along the roads that parallel the Rapid Transit Line's path. Some errors by the management of The Milwaukee Rapid Transit and Speedrail Company, which operated the curved-side cars as illustrated below, contributed to the demise of the line. The late Frank Zeidler was unable to obtain legislative support for a transit authority to continue its operation.

Unattributed photo of Speedrail car 63 in Waukesha from Spring City Chronicle

Before Speedrail, and before divestiture, the combined power and transit company operated these rather substantial cars. One history of the Rapid Transit line suggested that it would have been more successful had it been operated in the manner of a modern light rail line, with lighter, faster-accelerating cars. Those, however, had not yet been developed at the time the interurban company was upgrading the route to Waukesha.

Unattributed vintage photograph from Waukesha Freeman.

The interurban at one time had plans to move the cars out of the streets of Waukesha, in keeping with contemporary suburban light rail practice. A friend who worked for the regional planning commission discovered, in a survey of potential rail corridors, that one of the Wisconsin Electric transmission line rights of way uses land owned to this day by the power company, rather than the more conventional eminent-domain easement more commonly used by power companies. That right of way is exactly where one might want to run a railroad near the center of Waukesha without using the streets.

WHY CAN'T WE HAVE INTERURBANS LIKE THEY HAVE IN JAPAN?

The Economist highlights one reason for the commercial success of Japan's investor-owned passenger railroads.

JR East, the largest by passenger numbers, does not require any public subsidy from the Japanese government, unlike the heavily-subsidised French network. One reason for its efficiency is that JR East owns all the infrastructure on the route—the stations, the rolling stock and the tracks—meaning there are fewer management teams duplicating each other's work. (By contrast in Britain, for instance, ownership of the tracks and trains is split up.) But the railway also thrives because of a planning system that encourages the building of commercial developments and housing alongside the railway route. JR East owns the land around the railways and lets it out; nearly a third of its revenue comes from shopping malls, blocks of offices, flats and the like. This money is reinvested in the network. In Britain, where planning and transport are rarely aligned, it is hard to create similarly successful commercial developments. Indeed, most of the plans for the areas around the stations of HS2 are vague, and some of the stops along an earlier line, HS1, are still underdeveloped, years after the line was built.

In the Cold Spring Shops collection of obsolete software is the Amiga A-Train simulator, which one wag characterized as "SimTrump".  The player purchases real estate, right of way, and trains, then provides schedules and builds residences and offices, with the hope of making money.  (Looks like there's a way to download a compatible version for newer computers, as well as something similar coming out for Nintendo, if I have any younger readers, please advise.)  The simulation is loosely based on those Japanese rules that allow railroads to be real estate developers as well.

In the United States, it's all illegal.  There's one vestige of the old days left, the Blue and Green Lines of Cleveland's rapid transit began life as the Shaker Heights Rapid Transit, purpose-built for the residents of the eponymous new suburb.  (I've alluded to this interurban previously; perhaps a focused Throwback Thursday is in order.)  In Cold Spring Shops territory, the purpose of The Milwaukee Electric's Rapid Transit Line was to help the anticipated suburban householders who were going to buy their electricity from The Wisconsin Electric Power Company to get downtown to shop and to work.

In like manner, Samuel Insull's Chicago-area power, light, and traction enterprise built the Skokie Valley line of the North Shore in hopes of cashing in on suburban development.  These projects came up short account the housing-market crash we now understand as the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the Public Utility Holding Company Act made such energy and transportation conglomerate firms illegal.  But when you're fretting about the costs of infrastructure, or the absence of rapid transit substitutes for the daily traffic jam, remember your history.

Once upon a time, the power companies built railroad tracks and transmission lines in the same corridor. The purpose of building the railroad was in some cases to secure the franchise to deliver the power, some of which was provided via trolley pole to the railroad cars. And to keep those trolleys busy on weekends, sometimes the power company would build an amusement park at lineside. Chicago's Ravinia and Pittsburgh's Kennywood come to mind; the Pewaukee Yacht Club occupies space near another such amusement park.

And that, dear reader, is why we can't have interurbans like they have in Japan.

WHY DON'T WE JUST BET ON EMERGENCE?

I set a lament about the demise of electric traction in Milwaukee against a background of Technocratic Overreach.

After the War, the promise of Route 66 or the perpetual fun side of high school the Beach Boys were singing about made lamentations about trains being discontinued or streetcars replaced by buses so last year, to use a locution not yet in common parlance. And, from sixty years ago, the congestion to come on the expressways was something to be fixed by smart roads, and the possibility that all that public money spent on building the road network would ineluctably lead to additional public money being spent on a "wonderful transition" to something not a public road network, and sold under the rubric of building back better would likely have been laughed off as delusions.

That lament concluded, "Who knows, preservation railways might provide object lessons identifying all manner of policy failures, from the Public Utility Holding Company Act to the subsidization of excessively zoned planned use developments and the roads the localities lack the means to fix."

WHY NOT REPEAL THE PUBLIC UTILITY HOLDING COMPANY ACT? The Milwaukee area transportation summit is June 22.

What's drawing the participants to the $75-a-person, all-day conference at the Hyatt Regency Milwaukee is a much larger issue: The multibillion-dollar gap between the costs of the roads and public transit services that officials and citizens say they want and the cash available to pay for those transportation improvements.

Toll roads in the Illinois style? Not an option. Hybrid vehicles, diesels, and gas-sippers? Less dough for the Highway Trust Fund. Property taxes? Burdensome already. Special tax districts? A possibility.

Once upon a time, the power companies built railroad tracks and transmission lines in the same corridor. The purpose of building the railroad was in some cases to secure the franchise to deliver the power, some of which was provided via trolley pole to the railroad cars. And to keep those trolleys busy on weekends, sometimes the power company would build an amusement park at lineside. Chicago's Ravinia and Pittsburgh's Kennywood come to mind; the Pewaukee Yacht Club occupies space near another such amusement park.

THE TECHNOCRATIC VISION BACKFIRES.

Another decade, another fuel price scare, another misinterpretation of suburbanization.

“In the US we really saw an increase in automobile use in the post-world war two period, the baby boom generation. At that point in time, we had this new availability of relatively inexpensive mass-produced automobiles, this is the first time that people from middle income households can purchase a motor vehicle,” said Gregory Rowangould, the director of the Transportation Research Center at the University of Vermont and an associate professor in civil and environmental engineering.

“And at the same time you have soldiers returning from world war two, starting families, we have a huge population boom, so there’s also a need for more housing.”

At the time many cities were polluted, noisy and generally less attractive, Rowangould said. It led to a boom in the construction of suburban housing: cars and the suburbs went hand in hand.

“That has just been a pattern in the US that, once started, it’s been really persistent.”

The construction and planning of these new suburbs rarely included viable bus or train options. Many new neighborhoods didn’t have walkable amenities either. Now, people needed cars to go shopping, or take their kids to the swimming pool, and certainly to get to work.

Residential density makes getting to work or going shopping using the transportation company easier, perhaps at a greater risk of a plague running rampant. At the same time, though, orderly zoning appealed to the brains trusts of the era, and the rapid transit services that might have been laid down in anticipation of people building further from the cities was gone, a Depression era casualty of the Public Utility Holding Company Act.   Thus we get the exurban development pattern.

That's not to say people might not change their behavior if the incentives are right.

Many of the people in those areas live in homes in the suburban sprawl, rather than in the city itself, however, and to really successfully implement a shift away from cars, some believe there has to be a shift in the very way we live – by moving people back towards the center of cities.

“If we really want to move the needle on this, we are talking about people’s lives changing and we are talking about people living differently, and I don’t want to understate that,” [planning company engineer Christof] Spieler said.

It's possible that the needle might move for a variety of reasons, and the best thing for the Wise Experts to do is to lie down until the urge to micromanage goes away.  "In the same way that the American High built environment emerged piecemeal, whatever comes next is also likely to take shape piecemeal, although some experiments might be more successful than others."  In addition, thinking about your regional transportation authority like a business might work: connect the nodes where the most potential riders are first.

RAIL PROFESSIONALS, RATHER THAN RAIL ENTHUSIASTS. The Overhead Wire issues a transfer to a transit nerd quiz.

You know you are a mass transit geek if…

10. You get almost giddy at the idea of a compressed-natural-gas-hyrbrid-electric-powered city bus.

No, but a dual-mode trolleybus with an auxiliary diesel appeals.

9. The number of transit maps you own exceeds the number of cities you’ve actually visited.

No, although I know somebody for whom this might be true.

8. When visiting a new city, you make a point to ride its light rail, subway, bus, or ferry system. Even if–especially if–you have no where to go, because, well, duh.

Guilty as charged.

7. You know that intra-city buses are not much better than cars in terms of per-passenger-mile fuel efficiency, but still love them anyway.

Bleah.

6. You used subway tiling in your latest home renovation project. In the living room.

No. The hall is a gallery for South Shore Line posters.

5. You keep a running list of the transit systems you’ve ridden. With pictures.

Guilty as charged.

4. You know what a PCC car is, and where you can still ride one.

Here's a better description of the car, and with one running 25 miles from here, another occasionally running at East Troy, and a fleet in Kenosha, you bet I have ridden more than one.

3. You’ve had the yes, but the highway system was subsidized, too argument more times than you can count.

Afraid so, but if somebody wants to buy me a Sprecher, or a peppermint mocha twist, and then entice me into that conversation, I promise not to get nasty.

2. Your entire knowledge of the Spanish language consists of: No se apoye contra la puerta (Do not lean against the doors.)

Quiero comprar un burrito con salsa caliente, por favor.

1. You are convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, but wholeheartedly believe in the National City Lines conspiracy.

I will brook no argument to the contrary about Oswald's guilt, Sprecher or mocha or other inducements notwithstanding.

Roger Rabbit is a cartoon. The conspiracy is a canard. (Scroll and scroll.)

The last sustainable trolley companies were collateral damage in the New Deal. As I noted,

I've commented frequently on the Public Utility Holding Company Act (keep scrolling) and welcome recognition of its side consequences, particularly when it comes from sources that would ordinarily object to iconoclasm where Saint Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose obsession with Samuel Insull led to the passage of the Act, is concerned.

Offers of Sprecher or coffee, or, with Christmas coming, Peppermint Patty or Tom and Jerry to debate that are welcome.

BIG AMBITIONS ON THE SOUTH SHORE.

Chicago's Tribune enthuses over the addition of a second track to parts of the South Shore Line, and to the future incorporation of what we used to understand as the Gary Railways into the fold.

Back in 1927, representatives of the South Shore railroad discussed adding a second track to speed travel times, add trains and attract more passengers.

It took 90 years, but Indiana officials think that a double track for the South Shore from Gary to Michigan City, along with a line extension from Hammond south to Dyer, could finally happen. The state along with northwest Indiana counties and municipalities have pledged half the money for the nearly $1 billion project — now it needs the rest in federal grants.

In 1927, the Public Utility Holding Company Act had not yet broken the ties between the Electric Railway and the Light. That's something I've long lamented.

WHERE'S THE MERCHANT OF POWER WHEN YOU NEED HIM?  Radio news report this morning, about the aftereffects of Monday morning's derecho (everything that could have been blown away had been struck belowdecks here, the south side of DeKalb relatively unscathed; Rockford, Belvidere, Sycamore and the northern parts of Chicago got clobbered): power still out in Beach Park and Holdridge, and apparently much of northern Lake County, possibly not to be restored until Saturday.

Holdridge's Crossing on the North Shore Line.

Once upon a time, before the Public Utility Holding Company Act, Commonwealth Edison and the North Shore Line were part of the same company, and the mind boggles at The Road of Service being shut down for the better part of a week.

THIS FASCINATING RAILROAD BUSINESS.

It's the end of July, which means Major League Baseball will be offering doubleheaders, these days that's an evil dictated by a 162 game season and a playoff schedule that runs almost to the beginning of Karneval, and doubleheader itself is borrowed from railroading, back in the day when the Superintendent could not connect units with an extension cord, but rather, had to call two crews and put two engines at the head of the train.  Thus, we'll offer Book Reviews N^o. 20 and N^o. 21, both by railroad writer Christian Wolmar, whose primary area of expertise is British and Continental practice.

The two books are Blood, Iron, and Gold: How the Railroads Transformed the World; and Engines of War: How Wars Were Won & Lost on the Railways.  My post title suggests the universe of comparison: think R. S. Henry, a retired railroad executive who penned a series of popular-interest railroad books, including one with the title I borrowed for the post; he also wrote political and military histories of the Mexican War to Reconstruction.  Think also S. Kip Farrington, who wrote outdoor sports tales to accompany his train rides, although a Farrington book is a collection of shorter stories, without necessarily attempts to offer unifying themes, or analysis.  But books in the Henry and Farrington tradition are closer to the message Mr Wolmar seeks to offer than what you'd find in the academic analyses of regulation or merger, or to the nuts-and-bolts stories of technology and motive power the Trains, Tracks, and Travel series by T. W. Van Metre offered.  (Disclosure: your Superintendent effectively memorized a late 1950s edition of that book at the age of nine.)

Blood, Iron and Engines might be good introductions to the history of railroading, although the first time reader might want to trust but verify.  Cautionary example: the map of principal United States cross-country routes, at page xxii of Blood, Iron, shows the abandoned Pacific Extension of The Milwaukee Road but not the Great Northern near the 49th parallel, or the Overland Route across Wyoming, or the Water Level Route from Chicago to Albany.  More subtle example: it's difficult to write about railroading practice worldwide, when only North America, China, Russia, and to an extent Australia use their railroads primarily as heavy-duty long-distance freight carriers, while the European and developed Asian countries use them for passenger haulage.  That, however, makes discussion of an era of decline in (particularly investor-owned) railroads at the dawn of the Motor Age more challenging.  Yes, the United States put little public money into passenger rail, particularly at higher speeds; although, perhaps, the end of suburban electric railroads began with the Public Utility Holding Company Act, the sprawl and the interstate highways through cities won by default.

Likewise, Engines might attempt to do too much: the use of railroads in support of military logistics began in a simple fashion in Crimea; then Haupt and Grant and Sherman improved the concept on a continental scale to put down the Southern Rebellion.  But again, a quibble: a map of the Southern lines, which didn't connect well, and often involved a change of gauges, is incomplete, without awareness, for instance, of the Illinois Central from Chicago to Cairo, Illinois, making possible resupply of Grant and Sherman from Northeastern factories and Lakes area farms entirely by rail, as far into the southern states as they wished to operate, something the late-1862 moves on Corinth, Mississippi, had in mind.  Had the European powers understood the ability of railroads and quartermasters to work together, their twentieth-century wars might have turned out differently.  But again, Mr Wolmar's focus might be misplaced.  Battleship guns on flatcars, and nuclear-tipped missiles in boxcars, might be sexy, but although the troops generally fly or ride the bus today, their heavy equipment goes to the embarkation ports by rail.

Both books conclude with suggestions for further reading, and those sources might prove instructive to the budding ferroequinologist.  For the next level of analysis, I'd recommend referring back to my second paragraph, above.  Each also includes illustrations, some of obscure and interesting things such as the temporary pier railroad at Utah Beach.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

THE EXURBAN ENVIRONMENT CONTINUES TO BE EMERGENT.

A recent Associated Press analysis suggests, "Forget downtown or the ’burbs. The far-flung exurbs are where people are moving."  The story starts in Haines City, Florida, a little off the course of Brightline's projected extension.

Not long ago, Polk County’s biggest draw was citrus instead of people. Located between Tampa and Orlando, Florida’s citrus capital produces more boxes of citrus than any other county in the state and has devoted tens of thousands of acres to growing millions of trees.

But last year, more people moved to the county than to any other in the United States, almost 30,000.

Bulldozed citrus groves in recent years made way for housing and big box stores that could one day merge the two metropolitan areas into what has half-jokingly been dubbed, “Orlampa.”

The migration — and property sprawl — reflects a significant kind of growth seen all over the country this decade: the rise of the far-flung exurbs.

Outlying communities on the outer margins of metro areas — some as far away as 60 miles (97 kilometers) from a city’s center — had some of the fastest-growing populations last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Those communities are primarily in the South, like Anna on the outskirts of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area; Fort Mill, South Carolina, outside Charlotte, North Carolina; Lebanon outside Nashville; and Polk County’s Haines City.

The article suggests this part of Florida has not yet become stroad hell.

For some residents, like Marisol Ortega, commuting to work can take up to an hour and a half one-way. But Ortega, who lives in Haines City about 40 miles (64 kilometers) from her job in Orlando, says it’s worth it.

“I love my job. I love what I do, but then I love coming back home, and it’s more tranquil,” Ortega said.

And some of this dispersion might be a rethinking of cities in an age of plague. "The rapid growth of far-flung exurbs is an after-effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Census Bureau, as rising housing costs drove people further from cities and remote working allowed many to do their jobs from home at least part of the week."

The suburban and exurban land use patterns continue to be emergent.  And people have this tendency to do what they perceive to be best irrespective of the nudges of the Wise Experts.

Residential density makes getting to work or going shopping using the transportation company easier, perhaps at a greater risk of a plague running rampant. At the same time, though, orderly zoning appealed to the brains trusts of the era, and the rapid transit services that might have been laid down in anticipation of people building further from the cities was gone, a Depression era casualty of the Public Utility Holding Company Act.   Thus we get the exurban development pattern.

Which will take on forms that cannot be anticipated, let alone planned. "[T]he best thing for the Wise Experts to do is to lie down until the urge to micromanage goes away."

RIDING THE RAILS. DeKalb, Illinois, is fifteen miles from the west end of the Metra suburban train line at Elburn. There are two well-maintained mainline tracks of the Union Pacific, as well as a classic steam-era depot downtown and flat land near campus that could relatively easily be converted to a suburban train terminal with all the proper safety features.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is thirty miles from the north end of the Metra suburban train line at Kenosha. There is one track, kept in shape for the Oak Creek power plant, as well as a less-well cared for industry lead north into Milwaukee. The steam-era depots at Racine and Cudahy are in rough shape, and the interlocking leading from the former Chicago and North Western to the Milwaukee Road at Washington Street could use work.

Put your money on Milwaukee getting an extension of Metra service before DeKalb does. Owen at Boots and Sabers notes that a Greenfield legislator seeks to protect the commuter trains from a tax-limitation amendment being contemplated in Wisconsin. I'll leave the Wisconsin politics to Wisconsinites and focus on the proposed trains.

A Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission study committee has recommended extending the Metra service from Kenosha to Racine and downtown Milwaukee, with additional stops at Cudahy, South Milwaukee, Oak Creek, Caledonia and the Town of Somers. Planners are now conducting a more detailed study.

Sometimes the fallout from public policy changes takes a long time. These sound like limited-train stops on The Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Co. The pairing of "Railway" with "Light" was proscribed by the 1938 Public Utility Holding Company Act. But I digress.

There were stations at South Milwaukee and Cudahy almost up to Amtrak, as well as local stops at National Avenue on both the North Western and the Saint Paul. A Bay View station? I don't recall any such thing, although the idea of unloading from a train to walk to Three Brothers or DeMarini's has some appeal.